Tuesday, Jul 02nd
Last update06:03:20 AM GMT
Environmental Glance
Nigeria's Ogoniland region could take 30 years to fully recover from oil spills, a UN report says. The long-awaited UN study says environment restoration could prove to be the world's "most wide-ranging and long-term oil clean-up" ever taken.
The report found that pollution seriously threatened public health in at least 10 communities in the region. Oil giant Shell has accepted liability for two spills which devastated communities in 2008 and 2009.
A 1987 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finding, which the agency has ignored for years, concluded that hydraulic fracturing of a deep natural gas well in Jackson County, W.Va., contaminated groundwater and private wells.
Although the gas drilling industry has repeatedly claimed that such "fracking" operations in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale natural gas fields pose no threat to rural underground aquifers, groundwater and drinking water wells, EPA investigators concluded a gas well drilled and fracked by the Kaiser Gas Co. in 1982 did contaminate groundwater.
Last summer’s Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico clearly showed the conflict between science, energy policy and politics, and the looming battle over drilling in Arctic waters will be no different, as a watchdog group claims that federal scientists are being muzzled and harassed over their efforts to disclose potential impacts of energy development in the fragile Arctic marine environment.
Dr. Charles Monnet, a senior federal scientist working the Arctic has been placed on administrative leave and is being investigated by the Interior Department’s Inspector General. Such inspections are not uncommon, but what’s unusual in this case is that the researcher says he has no idea what the investigators are looking for.
A giant underwater “dead zone” in the Chesapeake Bay is growing at an alarming rate because of unusually high nutrient pollution levels this year, according to Virginia and Maryland officials. They said the expanding area of oxygen-starved water is on track to become the bay’s largest ever.
This year’s Chesapeake Bay dead zone covers a third of the bay, stretching from the Baltimore Harbor to the bay’s mid-channel region in the Potomac River, about 83 miles, when it was last measured in late June. It has since expanded beyond the Potomac into Virginia, officials said.
Taking a page straight from David Letterman’s book, a coalition of environmental groups released today a top 10 list of its most pressing concerns with the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s latest proposed regulations for mitigating the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas.
Five groups—Environmental Advocates of New York, Earthworks, Earthjustice, Citizens Campaign for the Environment, and Riverkeeper—were part of the list, ranking the issues while calling on the DEC to triple the public comment period on the document, which is scheduled to start in August, from 60 days to 180 days.
Take away the predators at the top of the food chain — the lions, tigers, wolves and cougars — and entire ecosystems start to change. A paper in today's edition of the journal Science suggests that humans' destruction of these top predators is causing reverberations worldwide in ways not apparent even a decade ago, including changes in the landscape and even increases in wildfires.
Although the idea that there are serious ecosystem consequences to the removal of top predators isn't new, with this paper, "it's come of age," says Aaron Wirsing, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Washington in Seattle.
A gas company that legally doused a patch of West Virginia forest with salty wastewater from a drilling operation killed ground vegetation within days and more than half the trees within two years, a new report from the U.S. Forest Service says.
Lead researcher Mary Beth Adams says that the damage to the quarter-acre, detailed in a case study published in the Journal of Environmental Quality, shows the need for more research into industry practices.
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