California adopted new sea-level-rise guidance for local and state planners today.TLDR: It won’t be apocalyptic in the short-term, but it’s bad, and you should pick your path now.By design, the Ocean Protection Council’s document is more diagnostic than prescriptive. It doesn’t really say what to do about existing infrastructure like Big Sur’s portion of Highway 1 that keeps falling into the ocean. Nor does it mention the most foolproof — and controversial — way to reduce risk: “managed retreat,” or simply moving inland.Rather, it updates sea-level-rise projections, ranks their likelihood and suggests deciding what to do with coastal projects based on their importance and life frame.Some experts and environmental groups are concerned it doesn’t go far enough in offering managed retreat as an option.“It feels like a little bit of a worrying trend,” Laurie Richmond, a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt and a co-chair of the university’s Sea Level Rise Institute, said in an interview. “I’m proud of our state, and I think we’re real leaders on a lot of this, and there’s a lot of support for sea-level-rise planning and innovative thinking, but I don’t want us to backslide.”Keep reading
Next week, the company that leased swaths of ocean space roughly 20 miles west of Eureka to build offshore wind turbines will begin gathering data on the site’s biological and geographic characteristics.RWE contracted with ocean surveying company Argeo to examine the ocean floor and identify its plants, animals and geographic specifications, data that could help determine where exactly the floating turbines are placed. The area off the coast of Samoa where the turbines would be built doesn’t have much high-quality data about it, said Rob Mastria, RWE’s project director for Canopy, their offshore wind project off the county’s coast.“We use them (Surveys) to figure out what our lease area looks like and several aspects related to that, like actually mapping the contours of the seafloor, getting an indication of what the soil looks like, below the seabed as well as learning more about are there any hazards or sensitive areas to avoid, what are the organisms and life on the seafloor and the habitats in the area,” Mastria said.Mastria estimated that turbine construction would likely begin in the early to mid-2030s, and his company’s work until then involves acquiring the necessary permits and conducting community outreach. He added his company hopes the heavy lift terminal – an infrastructural overhaul of the Samoa marine terminal meant to facilitate offshore wind construction and maintenance – succeeds, but it’s not completely essential for the project to proceed, noting RWE could use other ports to ship up materials.Keep reading
A new paper gives voice to the residents of King Salmon — California’s community hardest hit by rising seasDue to tectonic activity, the land around Humboldt Bay is sinking, amplifying the impacts of rising oceans. In King Salmon, the seas are rising three times faster than the national average. “It’s easy to think about climate change as something happening way in the future,” says Kristina Kunkel, who recently published a paper with Professor Laurie Richmond on her findings. “Like, ‘maybe we don't have to really think about it much yet.’ But King Salmon shows how it’s happening right now. That’s revelatory, for some people.”Given how few people had heard from King Salmon’s residents, Kunkel’s advisor Laurie Richmond wanted to ensure that the research wasn’t overlooked.
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As keen observers are well aware, the industrial legacy of the 20th Century left many contaminated sites around Humboldt Bay. In our second special EcoNews Report on communities at risk from sea level rise, local residents talking about several of the most vulnerable sites: Tuluwat Island, Butcher Slough in Arcata, and the nuclear waste storage site above King Salmon.Many thanks to Hilanea Wilkinson, Adam Canter, Jerry Rohde, Nate Faith, and to Jessie Eden, who produced this episode with funding provided by the California Coastal Commission's Whale Tail Grant Program.To contribute to the Whale Tail Grant Program, check the box for the Protect Our Coast and Oceans Fund on your California tax return. Every dollar helps to fund fantastic projects like our podcast series and Bay Tours Program! For more info:
Researchers from the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and environmental consulting firm H. T. Harvey & Associates recently deployed technology off the West Coast in one of the first efforts to understand how high seabirds fly and whether they might interact with wind turbines and other infrastructure. They published the research on April 24 in Frontiers in Marine Energy.“This is an important step in understanding seabird behavior at the height of offshore wind turbines on the West Coast,” said Shari Matzner, computer scientist at PNNL and coauthor on the paper. Data from scientists on research vessels have provided estimates of how high birds fly, depending on wind strength, but “this is really the first time we’ve had real-time, quantified flight height data for these birds,” Matzner said.Keep reading
