On China’s Beleaguered Yangtze, A Push to Save Surviving Species

In the early 20th century, fishers on the Yangtze River regularly snared what may have been the biggest freshwater creature of modern times: the Chinese paddlefish. The behemoth once reached 23 feet in length, a third of that being a paddle-like snout that it used presumably to stir up the river bottom to flush out food. A single paddlefish could feed a village and was especially prized for its caviar. But decades of industrialization in China’s heartland have sounded a death knell for the king of the Yangtze. The last time one was caught was in 2003, and it hasn’t been seen since.

The paddlefish is not the only Yangtze creature to have become the stuff of legend. The last confirmed sighting of the Yangtze river dolphin, or baiji, was in September 2004. The Yangtze giant soft shell turtle, perhaps the largest freshwater turtle on Earth, is apparently extinct in the wild. The last two known individuals, a male and a female, have been united in a Suzhou
Yangtze River
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About 40 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people live in the Yangtze River basin.
zoo but may be too old or too frail to mate. The Chinese alligator and the Chinese giant salamander are both critically endangered. The Chinese puffer fish and the Yangtze sturgeon are rarely spied these days. The Chinese sturgeon is on life support thanks only to hatcheries that release tens of thousands of fingerlings into the Yangtze each year.

Overfishing, pollution, and habitat fragmentation from dams — including the massive Three Gorges Dam — have brought the Yangtze to its current state. With more dams planned and Chinese officials intoxicated with unbridled economic growth, the future looks just as grim for the Yangtze’s vanishing species. Much of the river basin “will soon be a mere semblance of its natural state, offering few prospects for persistence of what remains of the river’s unique biodiversity,” says David Dudgeon, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Hong Kong.

All is not yet lost, however. Seasonal fishing bans have given some species a breather. “We can save the remaining ecology of the Yangtze,” argues Xie Songguang, an ecologist at the Institute of Hydrobiology in Wuhan. The potential savior that he and others are counting on is a 10-year fishing moratorium. Such a ban may seem drastic, but it would have a tiny effect on fish markets, as the Yangtze supplies less than 1 percent of China’s freshwater fish production, including aquaculture. A ban is feasible — if the political willpower can be summoned to implement it. With the Yangtze’s ecological health in obvious decline and the economic toll of a ban manageable, the prospects for a moratorium are looking better and better, experts say.

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In China, Three Gorges Dam's image showing some cracks

White-haired Zhao Chengmu lives just below the Three Gorges Dam, China's largest construction project since the Great Wall. If the colossal structure fails, the fragile 77-year-old shop owner will be one of the first to die.

But that's never going to happen, he says.

"This dam will be here for eternity," Zhao boasts. "Even if this dam is hit by a U.S. missile, it won't break — it'll just shake once."

Like Zhao, most Chinese herald their government's monumental enterprise to defy the mighty Yangtze River, choke off its devastating annual floodwaters and harness its raw power to provide cleaner energy. Such a mammoth engineering feat, they say, only serves to underscore mankind's supremacy over nature.

Critics consider the dam in less lofty terms: as Beijing's boondoggle. With an official price tag of $25 billion — and some estimates claiming three times that much — the costliest hydropower project in history demonstrates China's sheer arrogance in trying to tame nature's whims, they say, never mind the 3,000 tons of garbage that have been flowing every day into the reservoir recently.

A year after the dam went into full operation, cracks are already showing in the public image of the project. This year's torrential rains, the nation's worst in a decade, have severely tested the project's capacity to control the surging Yangtze, the world's third-longest river.

Last month, when floodwaters poured into the dam's 400-mile-long reservoir at 565,000 cubic feet per second, a government official acknowledged that "the dam's flood-control capacity is not unlimited" and hinted that more severe flooding could even risk the structure's collapse.

That's a far cry from the highfalutin claims of just a few years ago. In 2003, officials boasted that the dam could withstand the worst flood in 10,000 years. In 2007, the estimate was reduced to 1,000 years. In 2008, it was dropped yet again, this time to just 100 years.

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Kids in Punjab villages losing sight to polluted drinking water

Shankar Singh, 22, lost his eyesight a decade ago. His younger brother, Visakha Singh, who had no vision problem when he was born, too, lost his sight as he grew up. Welcome to Dona Nanka, a village on the Indo-Pak border where children are going blind apparently after drinking contaminated water.

At least a dozen children were either born blind or have been gradually losing sight within a few years of birth. "I started losing my sight when I was studying in the fifth standard. Gradually, I turned completely blind," Shankar says.

It's the same story in several villages nearby. At Teja Ruhela and Noor Shah villages, scores of children are similarly going blind. Residents say together these villages have at least 50 children and adults who have lost their vision to contaminated water.

At Teja Ruhela, Veena, now 7, lost sight in one eye when she was barely two years old. Veena's father Gurnam Singh took her to Sriganganagar in Rajasthan to restore her eyesight. She underwent an operation but it was not successful.

Shimla Bai, who will turn 11 this year, was born blind. She cannot keep her eyelids open for long as it hurts. Thirteen-year-old Saroj and her friend Jyoti have also been losing sight slowly. These villages drink groundwater hoisted to the surface by several hand-driven pumps.

Shankar's father Mohinder Singh draws water from a hand pump and pours it into a glass.

In about 20 minutes, the water turns yellowish.

"This is what we have been drinking for years," he says.

"There is no other source from which we can draw clean drinking water," he adds.

The government, on its part, has simply painted warnings on the walls of houses that the groundwater is unfit for human consumption.

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Prince of Tides: A Mammoth Turbine

What is being described as the world’s largest tidal power turbine was unveiled this week in Scotland. Dubbed the AK1000 by its developer, the Atlantis Resources Corporation, the one-megawatt turbine weighs 1,430 tons, stands nearly 75 feet tall and has six 60-foot diameter blades that can produce enough electricity to supply more than 1,000 homes.

The turbine will be installed later this summer at the European Marine Energy Center in the far north of Scotland, where it will be used to power a computer data center.

“Today is not just about our technology, it is about the emergence of tidal power as a viable asset class that will require the development of local supply chains employing local people to deliver sustainable energy to the local grid,” Timothy Cornelius, chief executive of Atlantis, said in a statement on Thursday. “The AK1000 takes the industry one step closer to commercial scale tidal power projects.”

Tidal power represents just a tiny fraction of the renewable energy produced worldwide, mostly because of the significant technical hurdles of deploying large turbines in flowing water. The majority of turbines in operation are experimental prototypes deployed in Europe.

Yet as the unveiling of the AK1000 clearly shows, the allure of producing clean, reliable power from the daily in-and-out flux of the tides continues to attract significant investment. And Atlantis faces substantial competition in the race to develop affordable commercial-scale tide power, with dozens of other companies developing a variety of turbine designs.

Flowing water can be tapped for power just as wind is, but because water is far denser than air, its movement contains far more potential energy. Tidal energy has other benefits: as turbines are placed underwater, they are silent and out of sight. And many tidal inlets with significant energy potential are found close to the densely populated urban areas where electricity demand is highest.

Rough and cold seas can cause heavy wear and tear on tidal turbines, but Atlantis says its machines are designed specifically to withstand the rigors of the North Atlantic.

“In order to get a robust turbine, we have had to make what we call ultimately the dumbest, simple but most robust turbine you could possibly put in such a harsh environment,” Mr. Cornelius told BBC Scotland.

from the NY Times

Pakistan floods 'hit 14m people'

The worst floods in Pakistan's history have hit at least 14 million people, officials say.

Twelve million are affected in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces, while a further two million are affected in Sindh.

In Indian-administered Kashmir, at least 113 people died in mudslides.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that a charity connected to a group with alleged al-Qaeda links has been providing flood relief.

Gen Nadeem Ahmed, of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), said 12 million people had been affected in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces, where 650,000 houses were destroyed.

The cost of rebuilding roads there was put at some 5bn Pakistani rupees ($59m, £38m), while the bill for fixing damage to power infrastructure and dams would come to another 2.5bn rupees.

"In my opinion, when assessments are complete, this will be the biggest disaster in the history of Pakistan," the general said in Islamabad.

Anger is growing at the absence of President Asif Ali Zardari, who left the country to visit Britain for talks with Prime Minister David Cameron.

With flood victims bitterly accusing the authorities of failing to come to their aid, the disaster has piled yet more pressure on an administration struggling to contain Taliban violence and an economic crisis.

Flooding has submerged whole villages in the past week, killing at least 1,600 people, according to the UN.

And the worst floods to hit the region in 80 years could get worse, as it is only midway through monsoon season.

According to the federal flood commission, 1.4m acres (557,000 hectares) of crop land has been flooded across the country and more than 10,000 cows have perished.

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Determining dangers of DEET

DEET may be safe to spray on your skin, but not to swallow in drinking water.

To see how safe or unsafe it is, the Minnesota Department of Health has picked the popular insect repellent ingredient as the first of seven "chemicals of emerging concern" to assess during the next year.

"We shower, it goes down the drain, and it ends up in wastewater that goes into rivers," said state toxicologist Helen Goeden.

Like many compounds, there are no state or federal standards for DEET, yet it has been detected in water samples nationwide, including Minnesota.

Examining DEET is part of a broader state effort to track dozens of chemicals in the environment, such as synthetic hormones, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and personal care products. Little is known about their potential effects on the environment or human health, so researchers must piece together whatever information is available, chemical by chemical.

For DEET, they will assemble data about where it has turned up in Minnesota waters and at what concentrations.

Goeden said there's no evidence of DEET in drinking water here, but it may be only a matter of time.

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Mississippi River pours as much dispersant into the Gulf of Mexico as BP

Every day during the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, contractors sprayed an average 140,000 pounds of Corexit dispersant onto oil slicks on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and into the oil being released a mile below.

But what few in the public understood was that an equivalent amount of similar surfactant chemicals -- the active ingredient in Corexit and in household soaps and industrial solvents -- enters the Gulf each day from the Mississippi River, with more flowing in from other rivers and streams along the coast.
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Surfactants are only one of a myriad of potentially harmful chemical substances delivered by the Mississippi and other rivers and streams to the Gulf each day, scientists say.

"We have abused the Gulf for years," said George Crozier, executive director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and associate professor of marine science at the University of South Alabama. "We have our own versions of the dead zone in Mobile Bay. The most famous is the Jubilee, which is certainly caused by nutrient-fed algae blooms and low-oxygen driven."

The surfactants in the Mississippi and other rivers are the ingredients in dishwasher detergent and industrial solvents that cause oils to disperse. They get into the Mississippi from the disposal of wastewater to sewage treatment plants and directly to the river.

According to a 1996 U.S. Geological Survey report, the median concentration of surfactants in the river was .05 parts per million. Based on the river's average flow rate, that would result in 140,000 pounds of surfactant entering the Gulf each day, said David Dzombak, director of the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research at Carnegie Mellon University and chairman of a National Research Council committee that authored a 2008 study of Mississippi River water quality.

Based on information released by federal officials Wednesday, an average of 140,000 pounds of dispersant a day has been used during the first 104 days of the spill.

The 2008 study Dzombak chaired, like many others, pointed at nutrients as the most obvious threats to the Gulf's ecological health, as evidenced by this week's announcement by Louisiana Marine Consortium Director Nancy Rabalais that this summer's annual low-oxygen dead zone created by those nutrients ranks among the largest ever, almost as large as the state of New Jersey.

During the past 20 years, however, researchers with the Geological Survey also have identified a variety of what they refer to as "emerging contaminants" that may also be harming organisms in the Gulf.

These include a long list of pharmaceutical and household chemicals, ingredients used to make plastics, and new herbicides and pesticides.

Former Tulane University chemical engineer Glen Boyd found that the river's water contained measurable amounts of estrogen compounds from birth control pills and of the aspirin substitute naproxen.

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