Wildlife Center to play role in post-spill Gulf
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
They’ve got plenty of people down on the Gulf Coast washing oil off birds. Ed Clark is focusing his attention at the Wildlife Center of Virginia on ecosystem issues.
“We don’t need to go down there and wash birds. They’re already well cared for by the professional groups. What we’re working on is the evaluation of what might be the long-term implications for wildlife, not only in that region, but since migratory birds come through that ecosystem, it might eventually mean that water fowl in Virginia have health effects that originate with the oil spill. Or it could be eagles eating fish that died from oil contamination that floated up to the surface, since eagles are scavengers. What might that oil do to those eagles? The implications of this are enormous, and there really aren’t any good mechanisms in place to follow up on them,” said Clark on Thursday. Read more
The Gulf Oil Spill: A Virginia Perspective
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
There’s only a “slim chance” that oil from the BP oil spill off the coast of Louisiana will end up washing ashore on beaches in Virginia, according to a James Madison University professor who is a Gulf Stream expert.
“The Gulf Stream, as it travels eastward, reaches its closest proximity to the coast in South Florida. As it flows northward from there, it starts to flow eastward. So by the time you get to, let’s say, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, it’s about 40 miles from the coast. When you get to Virginia Beach, it’s about 70 miles from the coast. So there’s only a slim chance that it would reach the beaches of Virginia, unless a storm were to come in and blow it toward the coast,” said Stan Ulanski, professor of meteorology in the department of geography and environmental sciences at JMU and author of The Gulf Stream: Tiny Plankton, Giant Bluefin, and the Amazing Story of the Powerful River in the Atlantic. Read more
Dennis Markatos-Soriano: Gulf disaster calls for sustainable transportation revolution
Posted by afp on May 27, 2010 · Leave a Comment
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The oil drilling explosion that killed 11 people on April 20th and the spill now killing massive amounts of wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico is a sign. It’s a sign of how bad our nation’s oil addiction has gotten and of how much we need to launch a sustainable energy revolution.
Eisenhower 2.0: Eisenhower built our interstate highway system in the 1950s, before we fully understood that burning oil for everyday transport would be so harmful. Spills kill wildlife in places like Valdez and now the Gulf, an inordinate reliance on driving increases asthma rates in our cities from Los Angeles to Charlotte, N.C., and even our Earth is heated by combustion’s greenhouse gas emissions. But now we know. Read more
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