News

Eelgrass could save the planet

11/9/14

Standing in a cove off Massachusett’s North Shore, Juliet Simpson holds a tube filled with some of the most precious mud in the world, mud that could have significant impact in the fight against climate change. But first, that mud needs to revolutionize how we think of sea grass.

Simpson, a coastal ecologist at MIT’s Sea Grant program, is on the search for carbon, and in this particular mud sample, which came from a sea grass bed about eight feet below the water’s surface in Nahant Harbor, chances are she’ll find quite a bit. Sea grass, also called eelgrass, photosynthesizes carbon out of the water column and then stores, concentrates, and locks it into the soils beneath it. There, because there is little to no oxygen, bacteria can take centuries to millennia to break it down and to re-release it back into the water and atmosphere.

Two years ago, in a first-ever global assessment, scientists calculated that the soils in sea grass meadows — despite being less than 0.2 percent of the world’s oceans — captured at least 10 percent of the ocean’s carbon. Since then the estimate has increased. Fred Short, a University of New Hampshire marine ecologist, puts the latest range between 12 and 20 percent. When combined with marshes and tropical mangroves, sea grasses are part of ecosystems comprising only 2 percent of ocean area — but accounting for a whopping 50 percent of ocean carbon storage.

Those discoveries are quickly elevating the concept of “blue carbon” among scientists and rapidly suggesting that these marine forests are as critical to controlling climate change as the emerald green Amazonian jungles and North American boreal expanses.

For some perspective, known terrestial forests take up at least 40 times more area than sea grasses, marshes, and mangroves. Yet the carbon storage capability of just 1 acre of sea grass is equal to 40 acres of terrestrial forest, Australian researcher Peter Ralph said in an interview last year with Voice of America. Marine plants, at the most minimal estimates, can bury carbon at a rate at least half that of all land forests combined. More optimistic estimates suggest their total ability at least equals and probably surpasses that of forests.

In the bays of Virginia, Karen McGlathery, an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia, is studying the world’s largest restoration of sea grass beds, a 5,000-acre effort led by the College of William & Mary. “We easily think of forests as important to climate change because they are tall and visible,” McGlathery said. “We see this little strip of grass along the ocean, and we think they can’t be as important as forests — but they are.”

But even as the importance of sea grass is being recognized, many coastal environments are literally slipping away. Short says the world has lost 29 percent of its known seabeds since 1879, and they continue to disappear at an annual rate of 7 percent — a loss that leads to the re-release of carbon back into the atmosphere at a volume equivalent to the emissions of 350 Bostons.

“[More sea grass] is disappearing than coral reefs, and that doesn’t account for meadows we don’t know about,” Short said. “What we do know is that we’re losing something like 20 football fields a day.”

New England is part of that global decline. Charles Costello, who has mapped sea grass beds for the last two decades for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, said the state has lost half its sea grass beds since colonial times. Massachusetts continues to lose up to 3 percent a year due to development, boating, and excess nitrogen and other nutrients in coastal waters from human waste as well as fertilizer and pollution runoffs from farms, lawns, and streets. Too many nutrients promote the growth of algae and seaweed, which block light from reaching sea grass beds. As the Smithsonian Environmenal Research Center says, “darkness can kill.”

While there have been small sea grass recoveries in waters off Gloucester, New Bedford, and Wareham, there have been significant losses off Salem and Martha’s Vineyard. Despite its globally praised cleanup, which has aided new pockets of sea grass growth, even Boston Harbor has overall annually lost four percent of its sea grass since 1994. In a parallel story, the harbor has lost 81 percent of its pre-colonial salt marsh and much of today’s remaining marsh is “degraded,” according to the Massachusetts Bays Program.

“Our lifestyle is a big problem,” Costello said. “There is so much activity on the coastline. I live on the coast, everybody wants to boat, everyone wants access to a marina.”

Attention should quickly turn toward coming up with policies to save the beds left and create programs to promote new ones. Cities, states, and the federal government should take a fresh look at water-quality efforts near our shorelines, from human waste to agricultural runoff to riverside industrial pollution. The clearer the water, the deeper and farther out sea grass can grow.

Though New England contributes to part of the decline, it also hold the hope for repair. Simpson — with the help of MIT Sea Grant Program engineer Michael Sarcany, Suffolk University student Briana McDowell, and Environmental Protection Agency research diver Phil Colarusso, among others — is working to map out the first estimates of carbon in Boston-area sea grass beds. The first measurements this summer off Nahant and Gloucester indicate that our local sea grass beds may contain as much or more carbon by area as what is being found in the rest of the world. Simpson believes the region’s salt marshes probably hold similar possibilities as constantly growing and shedding plant material decomposes into the soil. “In our more undisturbed areas,” she said, “you could go out to a salt marsh, pick up the soil and half of what you’re holding in your hand is probably straight carbon.”

Colarusso is also an adviser on the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, created by the United States, Canada, and Mexico as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The CEC is making a continental assessment of sea grass, marsh, and mangrove carbon. While Virginia’s sea grass renaissance is inspiring, Colarusso cautions that a large-scale restoration up and down New England’s coastline with its countless coves and crannies would be very expensive.

“The best thing we should be doing is conserving what we have in water quality,” Colarusso said. “We should be doing everything we can to keep nitrogen out of the water in drainage and runoffs.”

He adds, “With the cleanup we’ve had, we’ve seen some small patches of eelgrass appear by Logan Airport, the Outer Brewsters, by Hull, and off Winthrop. If we clean up the water further, we might see even more.”

More of a little-seen, but much-needed, powerful weapon in the fight against climate change.

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Tsunami lessons in a bottle:   Researchers ask for help finding debris-tracking transponders

   10/3/14

Nestled in the sand, hidden amongst debris or floating across the water like a message in a bottle are vessels carrying valuable research information from Japan to North America.

  Three years ago, about 30 instruments called transponders were released from various ports in Japan, tasked with recording the patterns of debris from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that was ending up on beaches from California to Alaska.

  The remaining transponders’ batteries are now dead, so researchers are asking beachgoers and fishermen to search for the soda bottle-like containers and return them to Oregon State University, which is partnering with Tattori University for Environmental Studies in Japan.  

Debris is still arriving on the coast nearly four years after the massive tsunami, bringing with it species that are native to Japan, said Sam Chan, a watershed health specialist with Oregon State University Extension and Oregon Sea Grant.

The paths of marine debris and where it ends up are largely unknown, so charting this would give researchers a better understanding of currents, timing and how species survive the long trip across the ocean through different habitats. It could also assist in being able to locate the estimated 1.5 million tons of debris set adrift by the surging waves.

These transponders have an antenna and record data about their paths and location. While this technology is not new, Chan said, it has never been used for this purpose.

“No one has actually used these to see how marine debris moves,” Chan said. “It can maybe help us learn how to reduce and locate it, and maybe clean it up.”

Originally, three transponders were released and two of the three were found — one in Arch Cape, Oregon, 19 months after it left Japan, and the other near the Haida Heritage Site, formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia, more than three years after it was set adrift, Chan said.

The second group of transponders was sent out about a year after the tsunami, and none from this study group have been found.

“We figure that they would be arriving any time now through next year,” Chan said.

Message in a bottle

Chan said the researchers lost signals on the transponders earlier this summer while they were a few hundred miles off the coast.

The units are small and can only hold a relatively small battery without sinking, so sending out signals 16 hours a day drained the battery before any made it to shore, he said.

“One of the units that we knew about this summer was drifting off the California coast about 200 miles,” Chan said.

With no signal, the researchers need to rely on people returning the instruments.

“We would be happy to pay for the shipping,” Chan said.

However, he wants people to be sure that it is actually a transponder before shipping it.

“We don’t want a whole bunch of people shipping 2-liter soda bottles,” he said.

The transponders are easy to identify. They are orange with an antenna and writing in both English and Japanese that describes what they are and where to return them.

Chan asks that people return the bottles to Oregon State University, rather than the address on the bottle.

Coming ashore

The Northcoast Environmental Center holds regular coastal clean-up days that focus on locations where tsunami debris is expected, said Coastal Programs Director Jennifer Savage.

“We encourage people to keep an eye out for anything that could potentially be tsunami debris, but we haven’t had any reports,” she said.

A 21-foot panga boat from Rikuzentakata, Japan, found on a beach south of Crescent City in April 2013 was the first documented piece of tsunami debris to reach California’s shores.

Savage said the Samoa Dunes Recreation Area and Del Norte County’s Point St. George are locations where debris often ends up.

“For whatever reason, the currents send things in the water to those beaches,” she said. “It is quite likely that if something were sent, like a transponder, it could end up there.”

The transponders are just one of many ways to study the debris that was swept into the ocean in the 2011 tsunami, said Nir Barnea, West Coast regional coordinator for the NOAA Marine Debris Program. He has worked with Oregon State University to get out information about the transponders.

“It is one piece of the puzzle,” Barnea said. “There are a lot of information sources, because this was really an unfortunate event, and we are still learning from it.”

While aerial observation, satellites and shoreline surveys are other ways that marine debris is tracked, Barnea said this is one more avenue to learn and to get information Barnea said severe marine debris events like the tsunami in Japan are rare and create public interest in where the debris goes.

Learning about the debris paths are important to the public, fishermen, the Coast Guard and other agencies who are affected, he added.

“There was a lot of need to have more information,” Barnea said. “It is very important to know how to respond to this and to learn from this.”

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A Bay in the Life of Humboldt

First Street Gallery presents A Negotiable Utopia

10/2/14

Rocky, man-made shores echo with barking dogs and squawking riparian life. Inky waters bob with seals, kayaks, porpoises and sputtering boats. Cyclists challenge 18-wheelers; hikers meet the homeless. High tide to low tide, day in and day out, Humboldt Bay is host to recreation, mariculture, economy and life.

"Simply by dint of its geographical power — its organizational reality — it's at the center of everything we do," says First Street Gallery Director Jack Bentley. "From transportation to our economy to its effects on our environment," he says, the influence of Humboldt Bay cannot be overstated.

This month, Humboldt State University's First Street Gallery presents A Negotiable Utopia, a show examining how the bay shapes life for and is shaped by the people of the North Coast, connecting us as a community and linking us with the rest of the world.

Situated a block from the bay, the First Street Gallery is in a unique position to examine these issues from an artistic perspective. A Negotiable Utopia is part of HSU's Art in the Environment series, combining the university's scientific strengths with artistic vision. Indeed, Bentley describes the work of the two featured artists as "artful design driven by careful scientific observation." Mary Mallahan's monumental sculpture details life below the surface, Cynthia Hooper's video and essay installations highlight activities above water.

Mallahan has created an interpretive sculpture that presents the bay's floor as a visual, color-coded map detailing natural and man-made fields. Over 18 feet long, 7 feet wide and 2 feet high, Mallahan's sculpture is composed of 41 individual pieces. Using satellite imagery and scientific reports, she divided the bay along its major water channels — those aqueous avenues still present during low tide — and crafted ceramic slabs to form a puzzle-like model of the bay.

With liberal artistic license, Mallahan took the generally flat profile of the bay and added a swelling undulation to reflect the local geography adjacent to it. The anticlines and synclines, mountains and valleys that outline the bay create a sloping topography for her sculpture, adding both visual interest and visceral form to her work.

Along the exposed edges of the piece, several distinct layers interpret the structure of Humboldt Bay's earthen strata. From the side, you can see protruding shell fragments, smooth clay deposits, sandy layers and rough-textured sediment. These layers, while based in science, are not accurate to scale per se, but remind us that the subterranean surface of the bay is comprised of countless levels of natural and human-made deposits.

For the top, Mallahan drew upon hard geological data to map out much more than mud. Using textured underglazes, the surface of her massive sculpture accentuates the diversity of plant life, terrestrial deposits and marine habitats on the bay, distinguishing tomato red regions of macro algae, silvery-green sections of patchy eel grass and chocolate-brown blotches of oysters and clams.

Hooper's interpretation of the bay focuses on human interaction with it — fishing cranes lining commercial docks, former pulp mills dominating the skyline and power plants anchoring the southern shores. Six documentary videos capture hard evidence of the sights and sounds that emerge from the water, and accompanying essays poetically explain how we've arrived at this historic clash of natural and economic forces.

"Humboldt Bay is this incredibly exhaustive topic," gushes Hooper. "Oh my God! There's so much to it!" Facts and figures fly from her tongue at breakneck speed and sentences barely finish before another passionate spiel spills forth. She's a voracious researcher, documenting the images and imprints that humans have made upon our waterway.

When looking at the politicized landscapes of Humboldt Bay, Hooper sees all sides. "We find common ground here and yet we find controversy in these places, as well," she says, noting that she avoids political stumping in her work, but "it's impossible to be politically neutral."

It's hard to argue with her videos, though. Averaging 10 minutes, each video documents one of six topics: water, power, transportation, conservation, shoreline and natural resources. Each topic gets its own video monitor and, to one side, an informed essay. Hooper says she's "cleaving to the factual" in her writings, yet "condensing the information in a manner that's entertaining and amusing and interesting and has my own artistic take on it."

The images can rest alone, but beg the viewer to look more closely at the explanations of how things got this way. Throughout the installation, the sounds of the bay mingle to create an aural simulation of the place and a metaphor for the overlapping intentions of those who use it.

Hooper shares a story about her project, describing how a First Street Gallery intern was unaware of the Coast Seafoods dock only a few blocks away, and how a fishermen Hooper met while filming at those docks had never heard of HSU's gallery.

A Negotiable Utopia, with its simultaneous scientific and artistic threads exposes the living organism as we've never seen it before, setting the stage for a wider discussion of our bay's historic and future significance to life on the North Coast.

A reception for the artists will be held from 6-9 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 4. The gallery's South Room will feature traditional landscape works by Stock Schlueter, Kathy O'Leary, Mimi LaPlant, and Andrew Daniel.

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Squid fishing comes to Eureka

Thousands of pounds of cephalopods unloaded at Fisherman’s Terminal  

9/12/14 

  Squid fishing boats docked in Eureka for the first time Thursday, unloading 124,000 pounds of squid at the Fisherman’s Terminal.
  Commercial squid fishermen from Southern California were drawn to the North Coast by following squid that were driven out of their typical habitat by a rise in ocean water temperatures, said Jeff Huffman, Eureka dock manager with Wild Planet, who helped to facilitate the docking and unloading of the squid boats.

 With few squid left in their typical fishing zones this year, Southern California Sea Food, Inc., has been moving up the coast. On Wednesday, two boats fished in the area between the mouth of the Mad River and the False Cape, south of the Eel River, bringing the first boat into the dock at 2 a.m. Thursday and the second at 7:30 a.m., Huffman said.

“The squid fishery has always been a Southern California fishery, but because of the warm water down south the squid are all up here,” he said. “There have always been some squid here, but not in these numbers.”

Unusual patterns in the Pacific Ocean have shifted water temperatures, creating unusually warm water both to the north and south of California’s North Coast, said Eric Bjorkstedt, research fishery biologist with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center and an adjunct professor in Humboldt State University’s fisheries biology department.

The temperatures have not grown warmer off the Northern California coast, which appears on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maps that track water temperatures as one of the only places along the West Coast that does not appear dark red — the color that indicates warming waters.

While this is not a typical El Nino year, Bjorkstedt said some patterns are consistent with the weather phenomena’s conditions.

“Normally in an El Nino, market squid do very badly — usually the catches go nearly to zero,” he said. “The reproductive success is not high, and the squid industry basically crashes for that year.”

Squid populations could be shifting north because of a change in water temperatures or shifting closer to shore because they are following a shift in nutrients and food supply, said Jeffrey Abell, chairman of HSU’s oceanography department.

Shifts in weather patterns and climate causes water temperatures and ocean nutrients patterns to change, he said.

“It manifests the shifts in ocean circulation, which alters the input of nutrients into the ecosystem, and then the organism responds to that and moves into a range where it is not usually found,” Abell said.

Either way, there is an unprecedented number of squid off the North Coast, Huffman said.

Southern California Sea Food, Inc., hopes to bring in 300 tons of squid every 24 hours, and the squid is then transported in trucks to Monterey, where it is processed at a company plant, he said.

Huffman added the company is limited by the number of squid that they can process, unload and truck, but not by the amount of squid in the bay.

“I think they can definitely catch more than we can actually get through the place and shipped out,” he said.

By Sunday the company will have five boats in the area, and they are hoping to continuing fishing for two to three weeks, Huffman said.

Having the fishermen in town will be a boost for the local economy, he said, as the crew of more than a dozen people stays in local hotels, eats, shops, buys fuel and pays for moorings at the marina.

“This is a great plus to the whole waterfront and the town,” Huffman said.

The goal of the Fisherman’s Terminal was to bring in this type of business, he said. The dock is typically used for processing crab, salmon and some other fish, but being able to unload squid there adds another avenue for profit.

“It is a unique opportunity for the city to use its loading dock. Normally this isn’t something that we get to do,” said Eureka Councilwoman Marian Brady.

“It is all money that is coming back into our economy,” she said. “We definitely need industry, and this is a form of commerce that uses our bay for its purpose. We built all this infrastructure, and it hasn’t been used optimally.”

The city is working on plans to get a cold storage facility in town to keep even more of the business local, she said. All the squid is currently being taken out of town to be processed.

“But these three to five ships that are in here, that is adding a spurt to our economy,” she said.

This is a positive development for the economy and the city, said Ken Bates of the Humboldt Fishermen’s Marketing Association.

“This activity at Fisherman’s Terminal is exactly the kind of thing we were hoping to see in Eureka when this facility was built,” he said. “It’s exciting.”

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Caustic liquors completely removed from Samoa pulp mill site

Sludge, other hazardous materials await cleanup  

9/12/14  

Once an imminent threat to Humboldt Bay, the 2.7 million gallons of caustic liquors and chemicals at the run-down Samoa pulp mill have been completely removed from the site after a nearly six-month effort.

  Environmental Protection Agency federal on-scene coordinator Chris Weden said that the hundreds of trucks that transported the liquors — chemicals used to break down wood chips into pulp material for paper products — had no incidents even as the last shipments left the mill this week.

  “There were no spills along the route, and all the liquor was recyclable,” he said. “There was no waste of material.”

  The cleanup at the 72-acre pulp mill site — owned by the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District since August — began on March 28 with members of the EPA, U.S. Coast Guard and local entities contributing. The hazardous state of the mill was brought to the EPA’s attention last August by the Wiyot Tribe.

  EPA officials inspected the site a year ago this month and initiated an emergency response after discovering that the containers and tanks holding the liquors were corroding and at the brink of overflowing into nearby Humboldt Bay.

  Next steps

Though the liquors and 10,000 gallons of sulfuric acid have all been taken to Longview, Washington, to be reused by another pulp mill, the cleanup effort at the Samoa site is not over yet.

  “There is a considerable amount of sludge in a lot of the tanks,” Weden said. “There are tanks that have 6 to 8 feet of sludge on the bottom, where the only way to feasibly remove that is to remove the tank — and we do that with boom trucks and cutting torches — and are able to recycle that material when they’re steel tanks and get a little money to pay for the cleanup.”

The sludge results from the pulping process, Weden said. So far, five steel tanks and six poly tanks have been decontaminated and disassembled with the full process likely to be over by March. Weden said the process will take another six months because there will be fewer workers on site, fewer trucks, holiday leave for some of the workers, and that the sludge must be solidified before it can be transferred.

Once the site is determined to be free of hazardous chemicals, the EPA’s hand in the project will be over, Weden said.

“As the hazards diminish, the needs for us to do that work also diminishes,” he said. “Our deep pocket isn’t all that deep, and there are plenty of other waste sites that need to be addressed.”

Payback

With the EPA’s assistance comes a $3 million price tag, which may increase. While a previous owner of the pulp mill, Evergreen Pulp Inc., has been deemed responsible for leaving the site in its decrepit state, the harbor district now has to bear the cost as the current owner.

District Chief Executive Officer Jack Crider said they had been negotiating with the EPA about a settlement agreement in the past, but are now working on a MUNIPAY assessment that ”evaluates a municipality’s or regional utility’s ability to afford compliance costs, cleanup costs or civil penalties,” according to the EPA.

“It’s a kind of a model that pulls in demographics information and the district’s ability to repay the EPA,” Crider said. “If the numbers come out right, you don’t have to repay them. We said, ‘Time out. We just want to go through MUNIPAY.’ So they agreed.”

Efforts by the EPA to contact Evergreen Pulp, Inc., for reimbursement over the last six months had been unsuccessful, but EPA attorney advisor Andrew Helmlinger said that has changed.

“We have found some contacts for them in Colorado,” he said, adding that he could not discuss the issue in more detail.

In the meantime, the harbor commission voted to sign an agreement in April with Coast Seafoods, Inc., for a $1.25 million limited obligation note.

If the harbor district fails to pay back the loan in a timely manner, revenues from Coast Seafood’s nearly 300-acre tidelands lease with the district will be used to repay it. As part of the agreement, the district also agreed to extend the company’s tidelands lease by 40 years, starting one year from this month, which will remain in effect until the loan is repaid in full, according to a May 27 addendum. Once repaid, the lease will reduce to five years with the company retaining the option to renew it another five years.

Future developments

Crider said he is optimistic about the harbor district’s efforts by to turn the pulp mill’s abandoned machine shops and warehouses into a functioning business hub.

Recently, representatives from Mitsubishi inspected an area that may be the home of a pellet factory by the company Energistics.

“Keep your fingers crossed,” Crider said. “We’ve also got Taylor Shellfish in there now, and they’re expanding. The most serious one is Coast Seafood. They are going through a major expansion.”

The harbor district has also paid for a two-year option to purchase the nearly 80 acres of pulp mill still owned by previous mill owner Freshwater Tissue Company. Crider said the district received $12 million in new market tax credits, which can be used to improve the facilities at the site.

“It would enable us to put $3.8 million worth of improvements to the buildings on parcel A, and if we take full advantage of the entire $12 million then we should be able to generate enough capital to purchase the other two parcels, but we have to borrow money,” he said. “That’s the challenge.”

As to how the rest of the debris at the mill will be dealt with after the EPA leaves, Crider said that is something they will be working out in the future.

“With the liquors being gone, the catastrophic event that could have happened is at least gone and behind us and that’s, at least, a good feeling,” he said.

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