China’s recent economic boom has come at the cost of polluted landscapes and newly endangered species, and now a new study explains how another species has been left teetering on the brink of extinction. The endangered Chinese sturgeon live in the East China and Yellow seas and return to China’s Yangtze River to spawn. Construction of dams on the river is thought to have contributed to a decline in the species, and an artificial propagation effort has not resulted in recovery of the fish [AP]. But the new study shows that a chemical called triphenyltin (TPT), which is commonly used in paint, may be the true culprit behind the sturgeon’s decline.
The tin-containing organic compound TPT is extensively used in paints to prevent the fouling of ship hulls and fishing nets. It is also used in fungicide to treat crops in China. A derivative of TPT is also used to eliminate snails in paddy fields [Reuters]. In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that river water polluted with the chemical is producing sturgeon with misshapen skeletons and deformed eyes.
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As early as 1400 B.C., the people of the Andes dug deep to mine the mercury ore called cinnabar, which they crushed to produce a bright red pigment. The pigment, vermilion, was used in ancient Andean rituals and is frequently found adorning gold and silver ceremonial objects in ancient burials of kings and nobles in South America [National Geographic]. While obvious traces of those mines were obliterated by later mining operations run by the Incas and then the Spanish colonists, a clever new study used sediment samples from lake bottoms to uncover evidence of the ancient mining–and the accompanying mercury pollution.
Researchers found that the cinnabar mining started long before the Chavín culture—which Cooke described as “the cradle of complex Andean culture”—peaked, between 800 B.C. and 400 B.C. in central Peru. “The traditional thinking has been that large-scale mining and metallurgy only begins after you get the emergence of large-scale societies that have social stratification and people can specialize in different crafts,” Cooke said [National Geographic]. Instead, Cooke suggests that mining may have encouraged the rise of complex society, as a leader with access to vermilion could have held great sway over a large group of people.
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President Obama proposed new fuel efficiency standards today, establishing the first nationwide regulation for greenhouse gases [Washington Post]. The proposal is centered around the strictest plan ever for increasing fuel standards for passenger vehicles, sharply raising pressure on struggling automakers to make more efficient cars and trucks [Reuters]. Under the plan, cars would be required to reach an average efficiency of 35.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2016—four years earlier than the deadline imposed by the 2007 energy bill. Light trucks would be required to reach 30 mpg.
The new rules would pose a challenge for car manufacturers: the White House estimates the current average efficiency to be 25 mpg. The new standards would resolve the spat between California and auto manufacturers over implementing the state’s emissions regulations [ClimateWire]. In return for the strict national rules, California will drop its plans to impose strict state-wide standards for fuel efficiency, which had been bitterly resisted by both carmakers and President George Bush. In practice California’s rules tend to override milder national regulations, as it is cheaper to follow them than to produce different vehicles [The Economist].
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Seven grassroots activists who fought powerful polluting industries and often stood up to intimidation are now receiving rewards and recognition: They’re winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize, sometimes called the environmental Nobel Prize. Each year winners are chosen from the six inhabited continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands and Island Nations, North America, and South and Central America [USA Today]. Each winner receives a $150,000 purse.
The winner from North America, Maria Gunnoe, took her stand against coal mining companies in Appalachia, where companies commonly blast the tops of mountains apart to expose hard-to-reach coal seams, and dump the debris in the valleys. “I never even knew I was an environmentalist,” Gunnoe, who lives in southwestern West Virginia, said with a chuckle. Though raised to mind her own business, she was also taught to fight when attacked. That’s how she sees the destruction of her gardens and orchard…. Gunnoe’s home sits below a valley fill and has been flooded with coal waste seven times since 2000 [AP].
Gunroe says she has received numerous threats from miners angered by her opposition the coal industry; after she helped convince a judge in 2007 to shut down an operator working without a legal permit, a “wanted” poster printed with her face hung in local stores until the FBI demanded its removal [Mercury News].
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Chemicals that prevent your house, sofa, and clothes from bursting into flames are ending up in coastal waters all around the United States, and could be damaging the health of both sea creatures and the humans who consume those animals, according to a new study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Says the NOAA’s John Dunnigan: “This is a wake-up call for Americans concerned about the health of our coastal waters and their personal health…. Scientific evidence strongly documents that these contaminants impact the food web and action is needed to reduce the threats posed to aquatic resources and human health” [The Oregonian].
Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDEs) are a class of flame retardant chemicals that have been widely used in consumer products since the 1970s. The chemicals are credited with saving hundreds of lives each year from the spread of fire, federal scientists said…. But studies on animals have shown that flame retardants can cause thyroid hormone disruption and interfere with developing reproductive and nervous systems [Los Angeles Times].
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The fish living in rivers around American cities are being medicated, like it or not. A broad new study of fish in five metropolitan areas has shown that fish are contaminated with a cocktail of prescription medications, including pharmaceuticals used to treat depression, bipolar disorder, allergies, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. Researchers say this new form of pollution, a consequence of our medicated society, may have environmental or health consequences that aren’t yet understood.
Pharmaceuticals end up in drinking water—and in fish—when people take medications and residue passes through their bodies into the sewers. Conventional sewage and drinking water treatment filters out some substances, or at least reduces the concentrations [Chicago Tribune]. But pharmaceutical traces make it through the sewage processing and end up in river water. When fish take in the water through their gills, the chemicals accumulate in their livers and other tissue.
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Twenty years have passed, and oil from the Exxon Valdez spill still taints Alaska’s shores and waters: roughly 21,000 of the original 11 million gallons remain, and have spread up to 450 miles from the spill site in Prince William Sound.
A report by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council—a state and federal partnership formed to oversee ecosystem recovery efforts—lists nine species, including the bald eagle, as fully recovered, but many of the area’s fish populations remain low. Sea otters and harlequin ducks continue to die because they dig for food in the sand and release buried oil, pockets of which remain buried in small portions of the intertidal zone hard hit by the spill. Seven distinct species, including sea otters, killer whales and clams, still are considered to be “recovering” from the initial effects of the oil [Seattle Times].
The initial death toll was estimated to include 250,000 seabirds, 4,000 sea otters, 250 bald eagles, and more than 20 orca whales [National Geographic News], according to the World Wildlife Fund. The herring population, upon which many of the area’s fishermen depended, has not yet recovered. And mysteriously, the resident killer whale pod in Prince William Sound has shown signs of “unusual social breakdown.” First, several females disappeared, leading to a loss of about half the pod’s newborn calves, and [this was followed by] the highly unusual defection of one matrilineal group to a different pod, never before seen among orcas in the North Pacific. The region’s transient killer whales, meanwhile, “show no signs of recovery and continue to decline” [Los Angeles Times], according to the Trustee Council’s report.
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To kick off the second week of his administration and signal his commitment to environmental and energy issues, President Barack Obama today asked the Environmental Protection Agency to consider allowing states to set their own strict standards for auto emissions. He also ordered the Department of Transportation to develop national standards for fuel efficiency. The moves are aimed at reversing decisions by [the] Bush administration, which he said had stood in the way of bold action by California and other states to limit greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles. “The days of Washington dragging its heels are over,” Obama said [Washington Post].
In 2007, the EPA administrator denied requests from California and 13 other states for waivers allowing them to set stricter standards for vehicles’ carbon dioxide emissions, despite the fact that the agency’s own staff scientists recommended granting the waivers. During a signing ceremony in the East Room at the White House, Obama made it clear that he sees a pressing need to address the United States’ dependence on foreign oil and the planet-wide threat of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. “Year after year, decade after decade, we’ve chosen delay over decisive action. Rigid ideology has overruled sound science. Special interests have overshadowed common sense” [ABC News], he said.
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Three pods of killer whales in the Pacific Northwest have now earned the unfortunate title of being the most contaminated wildlife on Earth, according to a new study. These killer whales, known as southern residents, live in the coastal waters near the U.S.-Canadian border and survive almost exclusively on contaminated Chinook salmon. The salmon contain high levels of polychlorinated biphenols (PCBs) and other industrial chemicals, which accumulate in even higher levels in the killer whales. Researcher Peter Ross says whales are particularly sensitive because they eat massive amounts of fish over a long life – killer whales can live for 80 or 90 years – creating a massive buildup of toxins. That means the whales, particularly the southern resident population, have become some of the most contaminated marine mammals in the world [AP].
Researchers estimate that the southern resident killer whales carry 6.6 times more PCBs than a different group of whales just 200 miles to the north, known as the northern residents. They found that the Chinook salmon in the southern waters, including Puget Sound near Washington state, not only had the highest concentrations of contaminants but also the least amount of body fat. This means the southern residents are suffering a “double whammy” because they are forced to eat extra helpings of heavily contaminated salmon. Ross and his colleagues discovered that 97 percent to 99 percent of contaminants in the Chinook eaten by these whales originated from the salmon’s time at sea, in the near-shore waters of the Pacific. Only a small amount came from the time the salmon spent in rivers, although many of the rivers are contaminated, too, Ross said. “Salmon are telling us something about what is happening in the Pacific Ocean,” Ross said. “They are going out to sea and by the time they come back, they have accumulated contaminants over their entire time in the Pacific Ocean” [Scientific American].
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Every winter, a thick cloud of brown smog settles over South Asia, stretching from southern China, across India and Pakistan, to the northern reaches of the Indian Ocean. For everyone who lives with the so-called “Asian brown cloud,” this air pollution is just a fact of life. Pilot John Horwood says the worse part about flying into Hong Kong is the suffocating, two-mile-thick blanket of pollution that hovers between 15 and 18,000 feet. “The whole cockpit fills with an acrid smell,” says Horwood, who started noticing the cloud in 1997. “Each year it just gets worse and worse” [Time]. But scientists have long puzzled over the cloud’s source: Is it produced by burning biomass, or by the combustion of fossil fuels?
Now researchers have analyzed the cloud’s composition, and found that two-thirds of the haze is produced by burning biomass, primarily the wood and dung burned to heat houses and cook food throughout the region. This research is the first step to doing something about the brown haze, which is linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths — mainly from lung and heart disease — each year in the region, they said. “Doing something about this brown cloud has been difficult because the sources are poorly understood,” said Orjan Gustafsson [Reuters], the study’s lead author.
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It may be a platitude that fresh, clean air is good for you, but now researchers have quantified how much cleaning up air pollution has improved the public health: It has boosted the lifespan of the average American city-dweller by five months.
Coauthor Majid Ezzatin explains that when his team examined three decades of health data from 51 U.S. cities, researchers found that people are living about three years longer than they did before. Controlling for changes in income, education, demographics and smoking, about five months of that can be chalked up to air improvements…. “Rather than just saying pollution is bad for health,” he said, “we can say that regulations are good for health” [Wired News].
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Contrary to conventional wisdom, fish in the Nile delta are thriving in waters polluted with fertilizers and sewage, according to a new study. While nitrogen-rich runoff usually causes excessive growths of algae and plankton that suffocate other marine life, the Nile delta is different because it has suffered from a lack of autotrophs (that fish feed on) ever since the Aswan Dam was built in the 1960s. Researchers found that more than 60 percent of the current fishery production in the region can be attributed to human-generated runoff. “This is really a story about how people unintentionally impact ecosystems,” explained co-author Autumn Oczkowski [BBC News].
The building of the Aswan Dam on the Nile blocked off much of the fertile floodwater that drains into the Mediterranean Sea, which in turn produced a sharp fall in the number of fish being landed by Egypt’s fishermen. “But in the late 1980s, the coastal fishery began to exhibit a surprising recovery,” the researchers observed. “Today, landings are more than three times the pre-dam level” [BBC News]. The increase in fish production coincided with the rise in fertilizer use along the Mediterranean coast. To quantify the effect, researchers collected more than 600 fish from four regions contaminated by runoff and two regions that were not. In regions affected by runoff, the fish contained nitrogen isotopes that could be traced to anthropogenic sources of nitrogen, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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It’s one of the biggest cleanup jobs the United States has ever undertaken, and it’s a long way from being done. Near the Columbia River in Hanford, Washington, contractors are decontaminating a nuclear fuel processing site that has 177 underground tanks holding 53 million gallons of nuclear waste, some of which has already leaked into the soil and groundwater. And the cleanup crew has learned that the known hazards are just the beginning. [S]loppy work by the contractors running the site saw all kinds of chemical and radioactive waste indiscriminately buried in pits underground over the 40 years Hanford was operational, earning it the accolade of the dirtiest place on Earth. In 2004, clean-up work uncovered a battered, rusted, and broken old safe containing a glass jug inside which was 400 millilitres of plutonium [New Scientist].
In a new study published in Analytical Chemistry [subscription required], researchers announced that the plutonium inside that jug had quite an impressive and terrible pedigree. Analyzing the sample’s isotopes and studying the historical records revealed that it was processed into plutonium-239 in December of 1944, as part of the first batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made. Just eight months later, Hanford plutonium was used in the nuclear bomb that fell on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
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Two-headed fish are turning up in Australia’s Noosa River, and experts believe it’s due to something in the water. Millions of fish larvae have been found with two heads (that means one more eye than Blinky) and none of them survive to adulthood. Aquatic animal specialist Matt Lando puts the blame on noxious chemicals wafted from a nearby macadamia nut farm. He said, “When we used the water on-site or have taken bass from the Noosa River those fish appear to have been contaminated and they give rise to deformed or convulsing larvae… I have been working in aquaculture for 10 years and this is the first time I have ever seen anything like it” [AFP].
Last October, Lando sent a report to the Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries in which he identified the pesticide endosulfan and the fungicide carbendazim, both used on the neighboring macadamia nut plantation, as the likely culprits. “The timing between the mist spraying and the affected larvae fits hand in glove,” he said. Dr Landos’s report also found that chickens, sheep and horses raised at the Sunland Fish Hatchery at Boreen Point were recording abnormally high levels of foetal deaths and birth defects [The Sydney Morning Herald]. Both chemicals are currently legal in Australia. Carbendazim was voluntarily withdrawn from the U.S. market in 2001 by the chemical company Dupont. Endosulfan is already banned in 55 countries and New Zealand will become the 56th starting this Friday.
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Disoriented and emaciated brown pelicans are turning up in California’s suburban backyards and parking lots, far from their coastal habitats, and biologists are struggling to figure out what’s wrong with the ailing birds. The pelicans are exhibiting very strange behavior, they say. A social animal, it is rarely found alone. So it was startling to find one bewildered bird in a Kmart parking lot in Lompoc, another outside a Costco in Goleta and a third on the runway at Los Angeles International Airport. One pelican was found at an elevation of 7,200 feet in the New Mexico snow…. “Normally, they’re on piers and places where they can find fish,” said Rebecca Ryan of the Peninsula Humane Society in San Mateo, which has stabilized several sick birds. “Now they are appearing in really unusual places” [San Jose Mercury News].
Researchers first wondered in the culprit might be neurotoxin domoic acid, which is produced by microscopic algae in the coastal waters; the birds ingest the acid by eating fish that consumed the algae. But researchers say that the pelicans’ symptoms don’t match the usual pattern seen in a domoic acid outbreak. Domoic acid poisoning usually causes seizures, researchers say, and these birds have had none. The toxin also typically affects marine mammals as well as birds, and no such problems have been reported in sea lions or other mammals. Finally, most of the hundreds of ailing pelicans are thin, but birds poisoned by domoic acid are typically of good body weight [AP].
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