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WASHINGTON – A conservation group filed a federal lawsuit Monday to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to enforce the law and clean up the polluted Chesapeake Bay, citing 25 years of failure to restore the nation's largest estuary. The lawsuit asserts that the EPA's failure to meet its obligations "has led to the continued degradation of water quality in the Chesapeake Bay," harming natural resources and the residents who depend on them. Poor water quality caused by pollution has harmed the blue crab population, destroyed underwater grasses and hurt bay fish. The losses have badly damaged the soft shell...

Size is reduced from what activists sought, but they plan to lobby Obama> The marine areas — totaling 195,280 square miles — are: * In the northern Pacific, waters at the northern end of the Northern Mariana Islands, including the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of Earth's oceans at 36,000 feet. * In American Samoa, the Rose Atoll — the world’s smallest coral atoll and one of the most remote. * In the central Pacific, coral reefs, pinnacles, sea mounts, islands and surrounding waters of Johnston Atoll, Howland, Baker and Jarvis Islands, Kingman Reef, Palmyra Atoll and Wake Island. These...

... Tapping the power of waves and tidal currents to generate electricity is promoted as one of many promising alternatives to the fossil fuels that contribute to global warming. But no one knows exactly how the technologies will behave in the water, whether animals will get hurt, or if costs will pencil out. The permitting process is expensive and cumbersome, and no set method exists for getting projects up and running. ... A new report that collected findings from dozens of scientists raises concerns about the impact wave-energy developments could have on the ocean and its critters. Wave-energy buoys could...

State and utility officials applauded the completion Monday of the world's first artificial kelp reef that they say will provide a thriving habitat for fish and marine organisms for decades. Spread over two miles south of San Clemente Pier, the pioneering reef was undertaken by Southern California Edison to make up for environmental damage caused by the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Advertisement “In the end we have both the energy and the environment we need,” Cecil House, a Southern California Edison vice president, said during a ceremony attended by about 100 people on the pier. The 175-acre reef was...

R.I. sets course to map its waters for wind farms 01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 BY PETER B. LORD Journal Environment Writer As coastal states race to build the country’s first offshore wind farms, it is clear that Rhode Island is following a unique path. The state has recruited a battery of oceanographers, engineers and other experts at the University of Rhode Island in an unprecedented $3.2-million effort to map and zone state and federal coastal waters to determine the best locations for turbines. Nearly 50 people from URI’s College of the Environment and Life Sciences, the...

With a tremendous splash and a profound thud, 30 old subway cars were dropped into the ocean off the coast of Cape May this morning, enlarging the nation's most extensive artificial reef system. State officials say the 18-ton cars -- stripped of their windows, wheels, axles and flooring -- will soon become home to a variety of ocean species. "They provide a very good habitat for marine life," said Hugh Carberry, the state Department of Environmental Protection's reef coordinator.Workers dump New York City subway cars into the ocean off of Cape May on Monday. After a five year moratorium, New...

ACCRA (AFP) - Rising sea levels caused by climate change will brutally redraw a 4,000-kilometre (2500-mile) stretch of west African coastline from Senegal to Cameroon by century's end, experts were told AFP Friday. "The cost of Guinea will cease to exist by the end of this century," said Stefan Cramer, a marine geologist and head of German green group Heinrich Boll Stiftung's operations in Nigeria. "The countries most threatened by this looming environmental disaster are Gambia, Nigeria, Burkina Fasso and Ghana," he told AFP on the sidelines of a major UN climate conference in the Ghanaian capital Accra. Cramer said...

People living on some stretches of coastline will be forced to abandon their homes and move inland as sea levels rise, the new head of the Environment Agency has warned. Lord Smith of Finsbury said plans need to be drawn up to evacuate people from large stretches which are threatened by erosion. Work is already under way to identify parts of the south and east coast which are most threatened and Lord Smith said there would be hard decisions to be made about which areas to defend and which to allow the sea to reclaim. "This is the most difficult...

Human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world's oceans down a rapid spiral, and only prompt and wholesale changes will slow or perhaps ultimately reverse the catastrophic problems they are facing. Such is the prognosis of Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, in a bold new assessment of the oceans and their ecological health. Publishing his study in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Jackson believes that human impacts are laying the groundwork for mass extinctions in the oceans on par...

UCSB Press Release: “OIL AND GAS SEEPAGE FROM OCEAN FLOOR  REDUCED BY OIL PRODUCTION” (Santa Barbara, Calif.) Next time you step on a glob of tar on a beach in Santa Barbara County, you can thank the oil companies that it isn’t a bigger glob. The same is true around the world, on other beaches where off-shore oil drilling occurs, say scientists, although Santa Barbara’s oil seeps are thought to be among the leakiest. Natural seepage of hydrocarbons from the ocean floor in the northern Santa Barbara Channel has been significantly reduced by oil production, according to two recently...

Marine biologist Milton Love drives a hybrid car, displays a banner of left-wing revolutionary Che Guevara on his laboratory wall - and has backing from Big Oil. The reason: his finding that oil platforms off California's central coast are a haven for species of fish whose numbers have been dramatically reduced by overfishing. That is good news to oil executives, who are looking for reasons not to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to remove the platforms once the crude stops flowing. Environmentalists say oil companies are simply trying to escape their obligations. "Just because fish are there doesn't mean...

Aug. 4, 2008 -- Jets of searingly hot water spewing up from the ocean floor have been discovered in a far-northern zone of the Arctic Ocean, Swiss-based scientists announced Monday. The so-called "black smokers" were found 73 degrees north, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between Greenland and Norway, in the coldest waters yet for a phenomenon first observed around the Galagapos islands in 1977.The earth's plumbing system of hydrothermal vents contain their own, unique ecosystems given the absence of sunlight at depths, in this case, of 7,874 feet, with vinegar-like water attaining temperatures of up to 752 degrees Fahrenheit.A team from...

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Already, some shippers, truckers and others who don't want to make changes are choosing other ports, according to Knatz, who said port traffic could drop 10 percent to 15 percent.

U.S. offshore oil fields could hold enough crude to supply all of the country's needs for more than 11 years. Or they might not. No one knows for certain because, with new offshore oil drilling banned on the East and West coasts, no one has gone looking for oil there in years. Now congressional Republicans are pushing hard to make offshore drilling a key issue in the presidential campaign, hoping to channel the anger Americans feel over historically high oil and gasoline prices. More oil, they argue, will bring lower prices. The federal government estimates the nation's outer continental shelf...

Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, reports Cath O'Driscoll in SCI's Chemistry & Industry magazine published today. Shell is so impressed with the new approach that it is funding an investigation into its economic feasibility. 'We think it's a promising idea,' says Shell's Gilles Bertherin, a coordinator on the project. 'There are potentially huge environmental benefits from addressing climate change – and adding calcium hydroxide to seawater will also mitigate the...

Next time you step on a glob of tar on a beach in Santa Barbara County, you can thank the oil companies that it isn't a bigger glob.

Scientists in Britain have discovered a new global warming threat to marine life in Antarctica -- breakaway icebergs that destroy any life in their path. Shallow habitats of species such as giant sea spiders, Antarctic worms, sea urchins and corals face growing risk from icebergs as they tear up the sea floor, The Times of London reported Friday. The findings indicate climate change risks go beyond rising ocean temperatures, the British Antarctic Survey team said. Although near-shore ecosystems routinely take a pounding by icebergs, the destruction rate is rising as a warmer climate shrinks the winter sea ice that otherwise...

Sailors and scientists have been mapping ocean currents for centuries, but it turns out they’ve missed something big. How big? The entire ocean is striped with 100-mile-wide bands of slow-moving water that extend right down to the seafloor, according to a recent study.

Experts on invertebrates have expressed "profound shock" over a government report showing a decline in zooplankton of more than 70% since the 1960s.The tiny animals are an important food for fish, mammals and crustaceans. Figures contained in the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) document, Marine Programme Plan, suggested a fall in abundance. Charity Buglife said it could be a "biodiversity disaster of enormous proportions". They said it could have implications for creatures all the way up the food chain, from sand eels to the seabirds, such as puffin, which feed on the fish. Defra described the Marine...