The Wild Alaskan Lands at Stake If the Pebble Mine Moves Ahead
The proposed Pebble Mine in southwestern Alaska is a project of almost unfathomable scale. The mine would cover 28 square miles and require the construction of the world’s largest earthen dam — 700 feet high and several miles long — to hold back a 10-square-mile containment pond filled with up to 2.5 billion tons of sulfide-laden mine waste.
Comments on Goleta Beach Project Coastal Development Permit
Open Letter from Dr. Orrin Pilkey, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Geology Duke University presented before the California Coastal Commission. The CCC will hold a hearing May 13th, 2015, in Santa Barbara. The issue is whether the Commission will order the unpermitted, environmentally-damaging rock seawall from the western side of the Goleta Beach County Park, to be removed.
St. Ninian’s Tombolo, Shetland, Scotland; By Norma Longo
Despite its icy temperatures, a Shetland beach has been named among the best places in the world to swim, alongside those in the Caribbean, Australia and the Mediterranean. This beach is St. Ninian’s Tombolo, a coastal feature that connects the southwest Shetland Mainland with St. Ninian’s Isle.
Finding Floating Forests
If you have ever walked along the California coast, you’ve likely had to navigate around clumps of seaweed. Before it was thrown up by the surf and left to dry on the beach, that seeming jetsam was part of a majestic underwater forest just offshore.
Spain’s Wetlands Wonder Is Under Threat For a Second Time In 16 Years
Doñana national park, a haven filled with rare birds and wildlife, survived a toxic flood. Now tourism, an oil pipeline, demand for water and the return of mining have left it on a knife edge.
Fukushima Operator May Have To Dump Contaminated Water Into Pacific
A senior adviser to the operator of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has told the firm that it may have no choice but to eventually dump hundreds of thousands of tonnes of contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean.
Deep Sea Ecosystem May Take Decades To Recover From Deepwater Horizon Spill
The deepsea soft-sediment ecosystem in the immediate area of the 2010’s Deepwater Horizon well head blowout and subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will likely take decades to recover from the spill’s impacts.
The Coastal Consciousness of John Gillis
Climate change is real and serious, but was not last fall’s “natural disaster,” like Katrina and like all the rest to come, as much about human failures, in infrastructure, planning, and our proclivity for building homes on shifting sandbars, as it was natural catastrophe? Those questions aren’t new.
New Analyses Find Evidence of Human-Caused Climate Change
New analyses find evidence of human-caused climate change in half of the 12 extreme weather and climate events analyzed from 2012