Project Katrina

Agence France-Presse reports:

Most oil-struck birds and turtles will die alone and uncounted at sea or buried in coastal wetlands, amid warnings the true toll from the Gulf of Mexico spill may never be known.

“Historically, they estimate that 10 percent of [oiled] birds are found,” said Rebecca Dunne, of Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research. “Others sink or they’re scavenged.”

Some 1,075 birds—633 of which were dead—have been recovered in the 50 days since the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig sank spectacularly some 52 miles off the coast of Louisiana. It took weeks for the massive, undulating slick to reach shore. Nearly half of those oiled birds have been found in the past 10 days.

Complicating rescue and recovery efforts are the sheer size of the slick and the fact that so much of it remains offshore. Dead birds sink in a matter of days. Oiled turtles and dolphins rarely end up on beaches.

Add to that the long-term impact from giant plumes of oil floating deep in the water column and a massive quantity of chemical dispersants that multiply toxicity levels. Most experts agree that the chemical dispersants are needed to keep as much oil as possible out of fragile coastal wetlands, but others have expressed concern that they could do more harm than damage to marine wildlife.

Well it is about time and now it’s official. A Federal district judge, Stanwood Duval,  has ruled that The United States Army Corps of Engineers was liable for the damages inflicted on at least three plaintiffs by its failure to mitigate the damage its construction and operation of the MR-GO channel caused to the wetlands and, ultimately to the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish on August 29, 2005.

National Geographic News reports:

There are now more than 400 known dead zones in coastal waters worldwide, compared to 305 in the 1990s, according to study author Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science

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Earth’s largest dead zone, in the Baltic Sea, experiences oxygen deprivation year-round, the press release said. The second largest dead zone surrounds the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite decades of efforts to clean up U.S. rivers and lakes, high nitrogen levels are currently combining with strong water flow to make that dead zone larger than it has ever been.

Several government-supported scientists are forecasting an expansion of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone to a record 8,800 square miles (23,000 square kilometers), an area larger than New Jersey.

Update: More information from the Washington Post.

After opposing Everglades restoration legislation Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) tomorrow will visit the Everglades in an attempt to boost his environmental street cred. But as Think Progress and the Wonk Room outline, a year ago, McCain aligned himself with President Bush and opposed “spending $2 billion on restoring the national park.”

The Gulf Coast Dead Zone is one of the reasons Katrina did as much damage as it did. The Dead Zone is caused by a number of interrelated factors. But regardless of what the exact cause is, each year it is one factor (on multiple levels) that contributes to the eroding the coast of Louisiana. The lost wet lands, totaling hundreds of acres a year, serve as a buffer against large storms. Lets cue a new, or at least an increased factor that will contribute to the growth of “Dead Zone” and lost of yet more wet lands:

The large “dead zone” that grows in the Gulf of Mexico every summer is nothing new. The toxic runoff of nitrogen fertilizer used on conventional crops in the Midwest leads to a huge swathe of sea that is incapable of sustaining life. The nitrogen-rich fertilizer leads to an increase of algae life, which in turn removes oxygen from the water. The end result: a dead zone that typically grows to the size of New Jersey.

Corn is the biggest culprit in creating these environments, and now that the U.S. is looking to biofuels as a solution to its energy needs, the problem’s only getting worse. Bush signed legislation at the end of 2007 that will triple the amount of corn ethanol produced over the next several years.

For the residents of Louisiana bad news just seems to pile on top of bad news. Of course Hurricane Katrina and Rita in recent times cause enormous problems, but now it appears that glacial ice from as far back as 750,000 years ago is one factor in New Orleans sinking at a rate of 0.17 inches a year. A comprehensive plan needs to be put in place yesterday to deal with all the issues (most interrelated) that is causing this problem to continue to occur.

Sediments deposited into the Mississippi River Delta thousands of years ago when North America’s glaciers retreated are contributing to the ongoing sinking of Louisiana’s coastline, finds new research by NASA and scientists at Louisiana State University.

The weight of these sediments is causing a large section of Earth’s crust to sag at a rate of 0.04 to 0.3 inches a year, the study determined.

The sediments pose a particular challenge for New Orleans, causing it to sink irreversibly at a rate of about 0.17 inches a year, according to data from a network of global positioning system stations and a model of sediment data collected from the northern Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Delta.

“When the effect of this sinking near New Orleans is combined with a potential 0.9 centimeter (0.35 inch) annual sea level rise that could result should ice sheet melting accelerate as projected by many climate models, it is possible New Orleans could see a relative sea level rise of roughly one meter (3.3 feet) in the next 90 years,” warned co-author Ron Blom of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.