Hard to Even Imagine - Could It Be True?
A story out of the Los Angeles Times, written by Kenneth R. Weiss informs readers of a truly horrendous environmental disaster unfolding. It sounds like the stuff of purple fiction, of a fertile imagination gone mad in the search for fresh new horror stories to unleash upon an unbelieving public. And you can bet that's what I hope in the end, it turns out to be. But I doubt it.He writes of Australian fishermen in Brisbane's Moreton Bay being exposed to a virulently toxic substance which has the demonstrated capacity to make a person extremely ill with painful skin conditions as a result of slight contact with the contaminant. The contaminant being a kind of marine flora, a venomous weed known to scientists as Lyngbya majuscula - a primitive, resurgent growth that appears to be well on its way to destroying life in the oceans of our world.
When samples of this toxic weed were sent to the University of Queensland's marine botany lab and placed in a drying oven, fumes emanating from it were so strong that professors and students ran from the building choking and coughing. The weed was identified as an ancient life form, but one in particular never seen by marine botanists before. It is, along with its brethren, a virulent pox growing in the world's oceans, posing an existential threat to the more advanced forms of ocean life.
Mr. Weiss's article described a local situation in Australia in these words:
"The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour. When the Australian fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips blistered and peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsoes."We are witnessing the rise of slime", in the words of a marine ecologist and paleontologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. Present-day industry and agriculture practises combine to overdose the oceans with basic nutrients; nitrogen, carbon, iron and phosphorous compounds, altering the chemistry of the seas. These pollutants, in their great and ever-increasing burden feed excessive growth of harmful algae and bacteria.
"It comes up like little boils," said Randolph Van Dyk, a fisherman whose powerful legs are pocked with scars. "At nighttime, you can feel them burning. I tried everything to get rid of them. Nothing worked."
"As teh weed blanketed miles of the Brisbane's Moreton Bay over the past decade, it stained fishing nets a dark purple and left them coated with a powdery residue. When fishermen tried to shake it off the webbing, their throats constricted and they gasped for air."
Overfishing and destruction of wetland habitants have further crippled the ability of the oceans to protect themselves, as natural buffers which helped to maintain a balance have been overturned, and the fall-out is now worldwide. Blooms of syanobacteria turn the Baltic Sea into a stinking yellow-brown slush; dead fish bob in the surf; people experience trouble breathing, burning eyes. High tides leave green-brown algae sufficiently foul-smelling to make people nearby desperate for relief.
Toxins from high tide effluents have killed hundreds of sea mammals and emergency rooms are full of people suffering respiratory distress in Florida. Where these destructive patterns are most in evidence, scientists foresee an upset of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago. Where in our nearer history higher forms of life have gained supremacy over the primitive life forms, a reversal has been seen to be occurring.
Eighty percent of the corals in the Caribbean have been wiped out, two thirds of the estuaries in the U.S. despoiled; 75% of California's kelp forests, once prime habitat for fish, destroyed. "We're pushing the oceans back to the dawn of evolution," Mr. Jackson said, "(to that time) a half-billion years ago when the oceans were ruled by jellyfish and bacteria."
I would dearly love to be informed that this is some silly joke. But in truth, I imagine the joke's on us.
posted by Pieface @ Monday, September 04, 2006
<< Home