Tag: Gulf of Mexico

There Are Massive Chemical Dumps In The Gulf We Know Almost Nothing About

Huffington Post: There Are Massive Chemical Dumps In The Gulf We Know Almost Nothing About. In the 1970s, the EPA allowed chemical companies to dump toxic waste into the deep sea. Now, oil giants are drilling right on top of it.

Seventy miles off the coast of Louisiana, among a maze of drilling platforms and seafloor pipelines, thousands of 55-gallon drums containing hazardous industrial chemicals litter a vast, dark swath of the ocean floor. They’ve been sitting there for nearly 50 years.

Charles McCreery was a few months into a new job as an oceanographer and water quality expert at the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management when he first learned of the dumping ground. It was 2014, and he was tasked with reviewing oil giant Shell’s exploration plans in an offshore leasing area known as Mississippi Canyon, in the north-central Gulf of Mexico. Deep in the document, he came across the company’s internal policy for steering clear of toxic waste barrels, and what to do should their operations puncture or disturb one.

“The content, and its toxicity, of each individual barrel is not known,” the Shell document reads. “Within the area there are/could be many hundreds of waste barrels. Many of the barrels may have released their contents over time.”

DeSmogBlog, January 9, 2021

Articles include:  Climate Deniers & the Attack on US Capitol;  Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley;  2020 Climate Stories That Flew Under the Radar;  Bomb Train Accident;  2020 Gulf Coast Hurricane Season;  Norway’s Supreme Court & Arctic Offshore Oil Licenses;  Fracking Is Killing U.S. O&G Industry;  2020 & Climate Fight in Courts;  Climate Disinformation Database: Marc Morano

Abandonment Issues – Orphan Wells – 2 articles

Grist discusses Abandonment Issues. The number of abandoned oil and gas wells is on the verge of exploding. These industry insiders want to be part of the solution. One was still in operation with a pumpjack attached. The other two hadn’t been touched in years. They looked like rusty old pipes sticking out of the ground. A few feet away from one were three large tanks with oil still pooled inside. If any leaked out, it would run down the hill and into a nearby lake. Lewellen wanted the whole mess cleaned up. So he called his grandson and son-in-law, who work in the oil and gas industry helping companies acquire leases and negotiate with landowners.

The Daily Climate discusses Abandoned O&G wells leave the ocean floor spewing methane. The Gulf of Mexico is littered with tens of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells, and toothless regulation leaves climate warming gas emissions unchecked.

DeSmogBlog, October 16, 2020

Articles include:  Amy Coney Barrett;   O&G Bankruptcies  Cleanup Bills;  Report – US Oil Companies – ‘Existential Threat’ of Energy Transition, Report;   Hurricanes and Pollution – Louisiana;   Climate Disinformation Database: The Federalist Society

Study: Tropical storms can sometimes ‘supercharge’ the storms that follow

National Geographic discusses how Tropical storms can sometimes ‘supercharge’ the storms that follow. In 2018, a tropical storm teamed up with a heat wave to strengthen a hurricane—a storm-fueling scenario that might happen more often as the planet warms.

This hurricane season has already been one for the record books. The season’s 25th named storm, Delta, is closing in on the already-battered Gulf Coast—and there’s still another few weeks of the official season to go. The hot Gulf waters that have super-fueled Hurricane Delta are becoming more common as the planet warms, as is a combination of factors that can make big, fast-growing storms more dangerous.

A new study, published last month in Nature Communications, shows how one storm’s effect on hot, shallow Gulf waters—coupled with hot weather—created the conditions to amplify the next storm that came along into something much more powerful.

Study: Hurricanes near U.S. coast forecast to worsen and multiply due to global warming

The Washington Post discusses Hurricanes near U.S. coast forecast to worsen and multiply due to global warming. The 2020 hurricane season may be best remembered as the one that spawned so many storms that forecasters ran out of names and had to resort to Greek letters. But it is notable for another disquieting reason: the number of storms that developed in the mid-latitudes right off the U.S. coast. While this is not unheard of, it is unusual. And it may become more frequent as climate change alters hurricane behavior, according to a new study.

While it’s impossible to predict future trends from a single hurricane season, scientists can take historical and other data and run models to get a glimpse of what the future may bring. That’s what Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did in a new peer-reviewed study in the American Meteorological Society’s “Journal of Climate.”

[No link is provided, but a search at the American Meteorological Society’s site on hurricanes and global warming provides lots of interesting reading here.]

This finding builds on previous studies that drew similar conclusions.

Report: How lessons from Isle de Jean Charles could guide federal climate migration planning

The New Orleans Advocate discusses how lessons from Isle de Jean Charles could guide federal climate migration planning.

The relocation of Isle de Jean Charles’ residents from their disappearing island could help the federal government develop a model for moving more people away from rising seas, stronger storms and other effects of climate change, according to an auditor’s report to Congress.

In its report, the U.S. Government Accountability Office warns that “relocation due to climate change will be unavoidable in some coastal areas,” particularly Louisiana, Florida, western Alaska and parts of the eastern seaboard. To reduce the costs of federal disaster responses to increasing flooding and storms, the GAO recommends a faster, more aggressive and focused approach toward moving at-risk communities out of harm’s way.

 

 

Study: CARBON DIOXIDE THREATENS LIFE IN THE GULF OF MEXICO

Futurity discusses how CO2 threatens life in the Gulf of Mexico. Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the Gulf of Mexico are becoming harmful to marine life and the commercial fishing industry, researchers warn.

The paper appears in Scientific Reports. The data used in the study are publicly available from The Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT) database, much of which come from the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) Ocean Carbon Group.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased 40% since the Industrial Revolution (1760 to 1840) because of human activities—and the ocean, including the Gulf of Mexico, has absorbed at least 25% of it. That’s a trend that will almost certainly continue, oceanographers say.

Carbon dioxide is increasing in the open ocean Gulf at rates similar to those measured in the open ocean Atlantic and Pacific due to human carbon dioxide emissions, the study shows.

The team also found that carbon dioxide is increasing faster in coastal (on the continental shelf) Gulf of Mexico waters compared to open ocean waters, consistent with other studies showing enhanced acidification in coastal waters compared to the open ocean.

Deepwater Horizon Still Plagues the Health of Children a Decade Later

OneZero discusses how the Deepwater Horizon Still Plagues the Health of Children a Decade Later. Research says children suffered physical and mental health as a result of the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

Google Image search of “Deepwater Horizon aftermath” brings up an onslaught of sludge — pictures of animals, detritus, and large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico covered in crude oil. Since the massive BP-operated drilling rig exploded and led to a months-long oil spill in 2010, the area has seen massive losses to marine life, the generation of at least 35,000 tons of spill-related solid waste, and oil covering over 57,000 square miles of the Gulf.

Study: Hundreds of Toxic Superfund Sites Imperiled by Sea-Level Rise

Inside Climate News discusses a study showing that Hundreds of Toxic Superfund Sites Imperiled by Sea-Level Rise. The Union of Concerned Scientists, faulting Trump for ignoring climate change, says flooding there could wash deadly chemicals into nearby communities.

A new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists concludes that more than 800 hazardous Superfund sites near the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are at risk of flooding in the next 20 years, even with low rates of sea level rise.

The study, “A Toxic Relationship: Extreme Coastal Flooding and Superfund Sites,” was written by Jacob Carter, a research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists who began the analysis while working at the EPA. He was forced out of the agency in 2017 when the Trump administration signaled it would no longer prioritize climate change-focused research.