Slipping away: Erosion forces Olympic National Park to take a hard look at Kalaloch Lodge – the Seattle Times
Kalaloch is the third-most-visited of Olympic National Park’s nine districts…Kalaloch Lodge, run on a concessionaire’s contract by the global entertainment/hospitality company Delaware North…has grown into a beachfront hotel with a restaurant overlooking the ocean, a small grocery store, a campground and nearly 50 cabins sitting on the same bluffs where the Beckers built their rustic resort 95 years ago. Except there’s less bluff. And less of it every year….
NOAA and partners race to rescue remaining Florida corals from historic ocean heat wave – NOAA Climate.gov
In mid-July 2023, heat-stressed corals in the southern Florida Keys began bleaching—expelling their food-producing algal partners—amid the hottest water temperatures ever documented in the region during the satellite record (dating back to 1985). As weeks of heat stress have continued to accumulate, bleaching and death have become more widespread, raising fears of a mass mortality event on the region’s already fragile reefs…
Opposition grows to Indonesia’s resumption of sea sand exports – Mongabay
Marine and fisheries activists in Indonesia are ramping up their calls for the revocation of a new government regulation allowing the export of sea sand, saying the policy will benefit foreign interests more than local fishers and marine ecosystems…
The real story behind the Atlantic’s record-breaking seaweed blobs – BBC
Along the coastlines of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, a monster is lurking. It creeps in with the tide and you’ll likely smell it before you see it. Giant clumps of sargassum seaweed have been washing ashore, choking the surf and blanketing beaches in a brown, stinking mass.
The clumps are breaking off an enormous raft of free-floating seaweed known as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, which stretches 5,000 miles (8,047km) between the Gulf of Mexico and the west coast of Africa and can be seen from space…
Plastic-rock hybrids found on the Andaman Islands – Mongabay
A study found the formation of plastic-rock hybrids in the intertidal zone of remote beaches of Aves Island in the Andaman archipelago. This is a first record of these hybrid rocks, known as plastiglomerates, from India.
Samples from the island that were analysed contained polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride. Incineration of plastic litter could have led to their formation.
The impact of plastiglomerates on marine ecosystems is yet to be understood as research on plastiglomerates is an emerging field…
To restore coastal marine areas, we need to work across multiple habitats simultaneously – PNAS
Restoration of coastal marine habitats—often conducted under the umbrella of “nature-based solutions”—is one of the key actions underpinning global intergovernmental agreements, including the Paris Agreement and the 2021–2030 United Nations (UN) Decade of Restoration. To achieve global biodiversity and restoration targets…we need methods that accelerate and scale up restoration activities in size and impact. Part of the solution is cross-habitat facilitation—positive interactions that occur when processes generated in one habitat benefit another…
Is Fukushima wastewater release safe? What the science says – Nature
Despite concerns from several nations and international groups, Japan is pressing ahead with plans to release water contaminated by the 2011 meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. Starting sometime this year and continuing for the next 30 years, Japan will slowly release treated water stored in tanks at the site into the ocean through a pipeline extending one kilometre from the coast. But just how safe is the water to the marine environment and humans across the Pacific region?
How Plastics Are Poisoning Us – the New Yorker
They both release and attract toxic chemicals, and appear everywhere from human placentas to chasms thirty-six thousand feet beneath the sea…How worried should we be about what’s become known as “the plastic pollution crisis”? And what can be done about it? These questions lie at the heart of several recent books that take up what one author calls “the plastic trap…”
AP Photos In Sri Lanka, Fishers Suffer as Sea Erosion Destroys Homes and Beaches – AP
Ranjith Sunimal Fernando now has a shell of a home at the edge of Sri Lanka’s coast, lost to the sea. Waves lap past the broken walls into damaged, empty rooms.
“One night last month, my son went to the bathroom and I suddenly heard him screaming, ‘our house has gone into the sea!’,” said Fernando, a 58-year-old fisher born and raised in Iranawila, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of the capital, Colombo…