A September 2008 photo released by the Ocean Conservancy on March 10, 2009, shows a trash-covered beach in Manilla, Philippines. (Tamara Thoreson Pierce/Ocean Conservancy/AP)
washingtonpost.com - by Sarah Kaplan - January 20, 2016
There is a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans.
It coagulates into great floating “garbage patches” that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land. It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world’s sea turtles and nearly all of its marine birds, studies say . . .
. . . But that quantity pales in comparison with the amount that the World Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by the middle of the century.
Just weeks after blue-green algal blooms were detected in Georgica Pond, extremely high levels of the toxic rust alga Cochlodinium have emerged in Sag Harbor and East Hampton waters.
Cochlodinium first appeared on Long Island in 2004 and has been detected in local waters every summer since. According to Professor Christopher Gobler, who conducts water quality testing and is a professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, densities above 500 cells per milliliter can be lethal to both finfish and shellfish. The Gobler Laboratory recorded Cochlodinium at densities exceeding 30,000 cells per milliliter in Sag Harbor Cove, and over 1,000 in Accabonac and Three Mile Harbors.
Andrew Blankstein and Kevin Monahan - Friday, 29 Aug 2014 | 8:45 AM ET - NBC News
The beach is so central to California's identity that the right of surfers and sun lovers to access the sand is guaranteed in the state Constitution.
But now so many local landowners want to block public access to their chunks of the coveted coastline that there are several hundred alleged violations pending before state officials, including a highly charged case in which Vinod Khosla, a green energy billionaire with ties to President Obama, is fighting surfers over access to a beach south of San Francisco.
The problem: The growing emission of carbon dioxide from a wide range of human activities is causing unprecedented changes to the land and sea. Identifying effective, efficient and politically acceptable approaches to reduce the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is one of society’s most pressing goals.
nap.edu - Institute of Medicine. Understanding the Connections Between Coastal Waters and Ocean Ecosystem Services and Human Health: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2014.
Authors
Rose Marie Martinez and Erin Rusch, Rapporteurs; Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine; Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice (BPH); Institute of Medicine (IOM)
Spring 2014 Lecture Series Friday, April 4, 2014 7:30 p.m. Duke Lecture Hall –Chancellor’s Hall Southampton Campus
Dr. Christopher Gobler Stony Brook University
“State of the Bays, 2014: Nitrogen loading, estuarine flushing, and the fate of Long Island’s coastal waters”
This talk will first introduce a new organization, The Long Island Coastal Conservation and Research Alliance (LICCRA), whose mission will be to engage in coastal research and monitoring that can be used to protect and restore Long Island coastal ecosystems. Next, this seminar will highlight recent observations and research important for the conservation of these ecosystems.
13 August 2014 - By Mara Certic
Andrew Blankstein and Kevin Monahan 
submitted by Cheryl Stroud
