Olympic visitors flocking to Rio de Janiero, Brazil for this year’s Olympic games have been warned: “Don’t put your head underwater.”
According to a study contracted by the Associated Press, the waters along the coast of Rio are filled with a toxic sludge of raw sewage, “teeming with dangerous viruses and bacteria.” In an amazingly horrible comparison, swimmers need to ingest only three teaspoons of water to be almost certain of contracting a virus, with levels of pollutants “1.7m times what would be considered alarming in the United States and Europe.”
But it’s not just a warning for the visitors — Olympians competing in the bay (sailors, rowers, and open-water swimmers) have had to take extra precautions in the form of antibiotics and anti-pollution microbial suits.
“[The water quality] is a real concern. We’re going to have to be very disciplined about how we’re taking care of ourselves,” said Meghan O’Leary, a member of the U.S. rowing team. “Don’t touch our face if we touch the water. Covering our water bottles with plastic bags. We get splashed a lot. I sit in bow. It’s going to happen. We’re just going to try to control everything we can.”
Unfortunately, the most polluted areas are the points where Olympic rowing and sailing races will take place.
The New York Times writes that a part of Rio’s Olympic bid was to “capture and treat 80 percent of the sewage that flows into Guanabara Bay,” which certainly isn’t happening by the time the Olympics start on Friday.
Welcome to my annual Earth Week series! I believe that protecting the Earth deserves more than one day, so I’ve given it a week. Check back every day from April 20-24 to learn about a new environmental issue (or solution!) each day.
Sometimes we forget about the oceans, despite the fact that they take up 70% of the Earth’s surface. Or, more specifically, we forget to think about what ends up there.
A study in the journal Science found that we deposit between 5.3 and 14 million tons of plastic in the oceans every year. I mean sure, that’s a huge range. But to make it more fathomable, OnEarth made analogies for plastic totaling 9 million tons. 9 million tons of plastic is 136 billion plastic jugs, which, if stacked, would “reach more than halfway to Mars.” 9 million tons of plastic is “also the equivalent of piling five grocery bags full of plastic on every foot of coastline in the world.”
So, in other words, that’s a lot of plastic. And however you quantify it, a lot of it is going into the oceans.
If you don’t know, there is a huge pile of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The patch is actually a group of trash piles that collect between the west coast of the US and the East Coast of Asia. The trash “vortex” collects in a convergence zone in the ocean – where warm water from the the southern hemisphere meets with cold water from the Arctic. You can see the different trash piles below:
The plastic converges here because a lot of it isn’t biodegradable, considering it’s plastic. That, paired with the fact that we produce 620% more plastic than we did as a society in 1975, is causing problems for marine life as well as the health of the ocean. Mashable reports that when plastic is jostled in the ocean, it is sometimes broken up into tiny shreds, small enough to be ingested my animals and avoid nets of those trying to clean up the sea.
So what can you do to help? Here are some ideas:
Use less plastic: we only recycle 14% of plastic we use in the US, and that’s pretty bad. If you live in an area where recycling is easily accessible, please just recycle. Just put that plastic bottle in your recycling bin!
Stop using products with plastic micro-beads in them: okay, so ICYMI, your facial cleanser probably has tiny pieces of plastic in it. Do you have exfoliating beads? Bingo. Simple solution – don’t use these! Find other products . If you’re inclined to take a stand, find out more here.
Reuse the plastic you do use: use extra plastic jars to house snacks instead of using plastic snack/sandwich bags. You can also reuse the tupperware from lunch meat to take your sandwiches to work. There are endless possibilities!
Don’t use plastic bottles: if you read my blog, you know plastic bottles are horrible, not just for the environment because of plastic pollution, but because of water extraction too. The bottles are made of fossil fuels, too, which doesn’t help the Earth much.
It’s easy to make change – just pick what works for you and stick to it! A little goes a long way. Thanks for joining me for this Earth Week series!
Welcome to my annual Earth Week series! I believe that protecting the Earth deserves more than one day, so I’ve given it a week. Check back every day from April 20-24 to learn about a new environmental issue (or solution!) each day.
So, what’s going on with the Gulf of Mexico? The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, more commonly known as the BP oil spill, took place 5 years ago in April 2010. Here’s more background:
In April 2010, there was an oil spill of catastrophic proportions in the Gulf of Mexico due to negligence by BP executives and an explosion on an oil rig. This negligence caused the largest oil spill in U.S. history: 4.9 million barrels (205 million gallons) of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico over months, and the blast from the explosion killed 11 workers and sent oil spewing into the Gulf for 87 days. In September 2014, BP was finally found liable for the oil spill in 2010 in court, and was charged with gross negligence. The oil giant could pay up to $4,300 per barrel spilled in fines on top of everything they have already paid (number is floating around $13.7 billion).
Map of the spill during summer 2010 (photo by NASA)
A lot has happened since then – clean-up efforts have been partially successful, BP has been fined billions, and restoration efforts continue on. On the 5 year anniversary of the spill, news organizations and government agencies alike have compiled information for the public and put them in graphic form.
OnEarth Magazine, magazine of the Natural Resources Defense Council, put together an infographic explaining what scientists know about wildlife deaths, which total in the millions (click-through for full image):
The AP also created a beautiful interactive scrolling image that catalogs the Gulf’s health 5 years after the spill. Categories include the health of the seafloor, mammals, crustaceans, the food web, marshes, birds, fish, water quality, turtles, and beaches before and after the spill. Spoiler alert: every data point except one, the red snapper population numbers, has decreased since the spill (click-through for the full image):
Here’s a more comprehensive list of what’s been happening since BP was found liable for the oil spill:
1. A study in January 2015: found there may be close to 10 million gallons of oil stuck in the bottom of the Gulf. The scientists speculate the oil may have come from microorganisms digesting it and discarding it on the sea floor, and the extra oil may cause lesions (or death) to deep-sea creatures that live there.
2. The White House has proposed new deep-sea, offshore drilling regulations. If passed, deep-sea drilling rigs, like the BP rig that exploded, will “tighten safety requirements on blowout preventers, the industry-standard devices that are the last line of protection to stop explosions in undersea oil and gas wells,” according to the New York Times. This is huge, considering the blowout preventer is what faulted, causing the Macando well to explode in the first place. These rules and regulations would be imposed on all deep-sea offshore drilling equipment, as this type of drilling is expanding.
If passed, these regulations would be the third of their kind. In 2010, the Department of the Interior introduced new regulations on drilling well casings. In 2012, the DOI announced tighter regulations on the cementing of wells.
3. Cat Island, once one of the four largest bird-nesting grounds in Louisiana, has been disintegrated by the oil from the BP oil spill. Yes – an entire island is gone. National Geographic reports that the spill killed the mangrove trees on the island, the roots of which made up the sediment traps to make Cat Island an actual island. Since there is nothing to hold the sediment, the island has washed away. The 5.5 acre island was once home to rare and endangered birds, including the brown pelican, who’s habitat has been ravaged by the oil spill. Many brown pelicans were also found dead on the shores shortly after the spill. Watch the video below for more:
I noticed that my 2013 Earth Week BP Oil Spill update is one of the most visited pages on my blog, and was wondering why. Well, I finally figured it out.
A few weeks ago, some scientists (study found here) are speculating that there may be 10 million gallons of oil, previously “missing,” stuck in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The last set of BP’s criminal trials also ended Monday Feb. 2nd, but a decision isn’t expected for months.
For background: in April 2010, there was an oil spill of catastrophic proportions in the Gulf of Mexico due to negligence by BP executives and an explosion on an oil rig. This negligence caused the largest oil spill in U.S. history: 4.9 million barrels (205 million gallons) of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico over months, and the blast from the explosion killed 11 workers and sent oil spewing into the Gulf for 87 days. In September 2014, BP was finally found liable for the oil spill in 2010 in court, and was charged with gross negligence. The oil giant could pay up to $4,300 per barrel spilled in fines on top of everything they have already paid (number is floating around $13.7 billion).
Map of the spill during summer 2010 (photo by NASA)
Fast-forward to now. In January 2015, researchers at Florida State University published a paper, lead by Professor in Oceanography Jeffery Chanton, about taking sediment cores from the Gulf of Mexico to test them for oil:
The researchers took 62 sediment cores from an area encompassing 9,266 square miles (24,000 square kilometers) around the site of the Deepwater Horizon spill. Unlike other sediment on the ocean floor, oil does not contain any carbon-14, a radioactive isotope. Therefore, sediment samples without carbon-14 indicate that oil is present. (Read more on LiveScience.com)
Guys. This is a problem.
There have been discrepancies in reports of how much oil was spilled. Despite these discrepancies, BP has been charged with criminal intent in the whole debacle. During the spill, thousands of gallons were removed in a plethora of different ways. No one thought to look down.
It’s unclear exactly how the oil got there after the spill. One idea is that the oil particles clumped together at the water’s surface, or in plumes from the underwater leak, and became heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the Gulf. Cleanup crews also burned large patches of oil, and the resulting black carbon and ash could have sunk into the water, the researchers said. Or, zooplankton (tiny animals that drift near the water’s surface) may have ingested the oil and discarded it in fecal pellets that sank to the Gulf floor, the researchers added.
For now, the sunken oil may help keep the water above it clear and free of black oil particles, Chanton said, but it’s turning into a long-term problem.
“There’s less oxygen down there, and so that will slow the decomposition rate of the oil,” Chanton said. “It might be there for a long period of time, a little reservoir of contamination.” Moreover, the oil may cause tumors and lesions on underwater animals, research suggests.
The next question is this: how are we going to remove the oil? Are we going to remove the oil? Who will be responsible for the clean-up?
