Sustainability News:

In a study published today in the scientific journal PNAS, NOAA scientists and their collaborators reported Pacific herring embryos in shallow waters died in unexpectedly high numbers following an oil spill in San Francisco Bay, and suggest an interaction between sunlight and the chemicals in oil might be responsible. The oil spill was from the container ship Cosco Busan in November 2007 which released 54,000 gallons of bunker fuel, a combination of diesel and residual fuel oil, into the San Francisco Bay. The accident contaminated the shoreline near the spawning habitats of the largest population of Pacific herring on the West Coast. Scientists found that herring embryos placed in cages in relatively deep water at oiled sites developed subtle but important heart defects consistent with findings in previous studies. In contrast, almost all the embryos that naturally spawned in nearby shallower waters in the same time period died. When scientists sampled naturally-spawned embryos from the same sites two years later, mortality rates in both shallower and deeper waters had returned to pre-spill levels.

Other Current Environmental News:

1. Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill- Gulf of Mexico, 2010 Estimates of the clean up cost, following the explosion of the Deep Water Horizon oil platform run into billions of Dollars. This oil spill will go down as one of the largest the U.S. has ever faced. Depending on time...
2. Global Water Roundtable Created To Establish Water Use Standards And Address Clean Water Issues Stockholm, August 20, 2009 – A new initiative launched during World Water Week will establish global standards for water stewardship, with the goal of addressing the global threat of water stress, the increasing pollution of rivers and a decline in...
3. Yellowstone River water not toxic from spill, according to EPA Water downstream from a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline that leaked oil into the Yellowstone River showed no detectable levels of toxic petroleum chemicals, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency documents released on Saturday...
4. Deepwater oil spill likely to hurt fish populations over decades Oil pollution doesn't have to kill fish to have a long-term impact, according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Researchers found that Gulf killifish (Fundulus grandis) that had been exposed to very...
5. Water use growing twice as fast as population! Like oil in the 20th century, water could well be the essential commodity on which the 21st century will turn. Human beings have depended on access to water since the earliest days of civilization, but with 7 billion people on...