Reflections on Cape Charles and the Eastern Shore
After a few weeks off, the Taqueria Truck at the El R
Adivinen quien volvera a abrir a partir de la semana que entra ? La taqueria Los mantendre al tanto de el dia exacto!!
Check their Facebook Page to find out the exact day.
Scientists estimate that more than 8 million metric tons of plastic are entering our ocean every year. There could be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. From tiny plankton to enormous whales, countless animals across marine ecosystems are affected by plastic pollution. It’s found in 59% of seabirds like
Marine debris isn’t an ocean problem…it’s a people problem.
30 million tons of plastic waste was generated in the US last year, yet only 7 percent was recovered for recycling. Here are 17 ways to reduce your plastic waste:
Dutch inventor Boyan Slat founded The Ocean Cleanup at the age of 18 in his hometown of Delft, the Netherlands. The Ocean Cleanup is designing and developing the first feasible method to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. Every year, millions of tons of plastic enter the ocean. A significant percentage of this plastic drifts into large systems of circulating ocean currents, also known as gyres. Once trapped in a gyre, the plastic will break down into microplastics and become increasingly easier to mistake for food by sea life.
Going after it with vessels and nets would be costly, time-consuming, labor-intensive and lead to vast amounts of carbon emission and by-catch. That is why The Ocean Cleanup is developing a passive system, moving with the currents – just like the plastic – to catch it. The system consists of a 600-meter-long floater that sits at the surface of the water and a tapered 3-meter-deep skirt attached below. The floater provides buoyancy to the system and prevents plastic from flowing over it, while the skirt stops debris from escaping underneath. As the system moves through the water, the plastic continues to collect within the boundaries of the U-shaped system.
– BOYAN SLAT, CEO & FOUNDER
By deploying a fleet of systems, The Ocean Cleanup has estimated to be able to remove 50% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just 5 years’ time. The concentrated plastic will be brought back to shore for recycling and sold to B2C companies. The revenue gained will help fund the cleanup expansion to the other four ocean gyres.
In preparation for full-scale deployment, The Ocean Cleanup organized several expeditions to map the plastic pollution problem in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to an unprecedented degree of detail. The team simultaneously advanced its design through a series of scale model tests, including prototypes deployed in the North Sea 2016, 2017 and 2018. The first cleanup system was deployed from San Francisco Bay on September 8, being towed to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to commence the cleanup.
The Ocean
As the continued battle for the life and future of Northampton County continues to be played out over the update to the county’s comprehensive plan, across the bay in Chesapeake, a scenario that could be our future, is taking place right now. It pits developers against residents who want to hold on to the the last remaining vestiges of open space and farmland left in southern Chesapeake.
CHESAPEAKE, Va. (WAVY) — Thousands of acres of farmland are closer to becoming the home of a “mega-site’ that proponents debate could help bring jobs to Hampton Roads.
On Tuesday, Chesapeake City Council voted 6-3 to amend its 2035 Comprehensive Plan to change the purpose of 1,420 acres of farmland near the North Carolina state line from “agricultural/open space” to “commercial, industrial or a similar non-residential designation.”
While the move doesn’t officially rezone the property, it does allow owners of the Frank T. Williams Farms property to begin to market it for a potential Coastal Virginia Commerce Park.
Over the summer, Kevin Cosgrove, representing the Hampton Roads Chamber and Chesapeake’s Economic Development agency, proclaimed the “shovel ready” piece of property will help Chesapeake and the region to diversify its economy.
The lack of “shovel ready” properties was pointed to marquee issue when 10 On Your Side highlighted the region’s business climate struggles.
Prior to the vote on Tuesday, Cosgrove again stood in front of council again to endorse the move.
“I don’t have to explain to you the current economic development consequences in this city, you know them,” Cosgrove said. “Norfolk Southern just left … this is the best opportunity we have to get back into the economic development game.”
However many community members didn’t see it that way at all.
“This proposal is a direct attack on Southern Chesapeake,” said resident David Schleeper. He joined many concerned about increased traffic and environmental impacts on the longtime rural community.
“At the rate we are going there is not going to be anything left,” said Kimberley Hoke, with the group Stop Developing Southern Chesapeake.
Following the meeting, Mayor Rick West looked to calm fears, noting nothing is a done deal.
“This was simply a move to say we’re going to play, it doesn’t mean that we we have a game, it doesn’t mean that we have an offer, it just means that we are open for business,” West said.
Last month the Chesapeake Planning Commission unanimously endorsed the land designation change with stipulations that it won’t be used for “cargo container storage and repair, automobile auctions, salvage yards, solid waste facilities/landfills.”
The site remains farmed at the current time.
AP -Conservationists in Virginia and Maryland say a Trump administration proposal could undermine efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay.
The measure would roll back federal protections for certain waterways and wetlands.
It would specifically impact “ephemeral” streams, which flow after a rainstorm or snowmelt.
Also under threat are isolated wetlands that experts say help to filter pesticides and fertilizer from nation’s largest estuary.
An Obama-era rule protects those particular streams and wetlands and restricts some farming on land that sits near them. Critics say the rule forces farmers to hire expensive consultants to figure out which land they can use.
But Geoff Gisler, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, called the Trump plan “a sledgehammer to the Clean Water Act.”
RICHMOND AP — Gov. Ralph Northam on Wednesday called for “historic” investments in a cleaner Chesapeake Bay, proposing a five-year plan that he said would represent the largest investment ever in Virginia’s water quality.
Northam (D) said his plan would help farmers as well as urban and suburban communities limit runoff that pollutes the bay, boost staff at the Department of Environmental Quality and add funding for land conservation.
“There is no time like the present to take action to ensure the protection of Virginia’s natural resources, and these historic investments will ensure that the Commonwealth honors its commitments to improve water quality and to protect the progress we’ve made on restoring the Chesapeake Bay,” Northam said in a statement.
The measures, which Northam will formally propose Tuesday in a speech to the General Assembly’s money committees, drew praise from environmentalists, who helped bankroll his 2017 bid for governor but have been bitterly disappointed by his handling of two natural gas pipelines being built in the state.
The governor has been criticized for seeming to clear the way for two major gas pipelines being built across the state, the 300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline and the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Critics cry hypocrisy–Northam has put the region’s rivers, streams, and forests in the crosshairs of a massive, highly controversial proposed interstate natural gas pipeline. Designed to move natural gas from the Marcellus Shale to the mid-Atlantic and Southeast, the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline would fragment some of the most intact, forested landscapes in the Southeast—including the George Washington National Forest. Cutting across steep slopes and through rivers, streams, and wetlands, the pipeline would put Carolina’s waters at risk of increased sedimentation and harm to sensitive species like brook trout. Not only would the project harm our region’s environment and communities, critics say, but it is not necessary to meet the region’s demand for natural gas.
The plan Northam rolled out Wednesday would increase funding for controlling agricultural runoff and other water-quality programs to $90 million a year and dedicate $50 million to a storm-water assistance fund that helps urban and suburban areas reduce pollution coming off parking lots, roads and other impervious surfaces.
He presented that spending as “first installments” on a five-year plan that would bring total water-quality spending to $773 million through 2024.
Northam also proposed adding $11 million for land conservation and $2.5 million to beef up staffing at the Department of Environmental Quality, which regulates and enforces the state’s environmental standards.
A group of aquariums, including the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center in Virginia Beach are opposing seismic blasting along the East Coast as part of efforts to extract offshore oil and gas.
Seismic exploration surveys generate the loudest human sounds in the ocean, short of those made by explosives. The blasts — which can reach more than 250 decibels and be heard for miles — can cause hearing loss in marine mammals, disturb essential behaviors such as feeding and breeding, mask communications between individual whales and dolphins, and reduce catch rates of commercial fish. Adding insult to injury, the Trump administration is even proposing to amend the guidance document that assesses seismic damage to wildlife, part of its effort to undermine science.
Seismic testing involves blasting the seafloor with high-powered airguns (a kind of powerful horn) every 10 seconds and measuring the echoes with long tubes to map offshore oil and gas reserves — in the process disturbing, injuring and killing marine mammals and other wildlife around the clock for years on end.
The aquariums say they’re worried noise pollution caused by the blasting could harm marine life, all the way from microorganisms to giant whales. They also fear disruption of valuable commercial fish.
The participating aquariums are the New England Aquarium in Boston, National Aquarium in Baltimore, the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center, the North Carolina Aquariums and the New York Aquarium and its parent Wildlife Conservation Society.
AP – The National Marine Fisheries Service is set to issue “incidental harassment authorizations” allowing seismic surveys proposed by five companies that permit them to disturb marine mammals that are otherwise protected by federal law, according to three people familiar with the activity who asked not to be named before a formal announcement.
This is a first step toward allowing a first-in-a-generation seismic search for oil and gas under Atlantic waters, despite protests that the geological tests involve loud air gun blasts that will harm whales, dolphins and other animals.
North Atlantic Right Whales – Image: nmfs.noaa.gov
The firms—including TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Co. ASA and Schlumberger Ltd. subsidiary WesternGeco Ltd. – still must win individual permits from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management before they can conduct the work, but those are widely expected under President Donald Trump, who has made “energy dominance” a signature goal.
The seismic surveys to identify oil and gas reserves could be conducted in Atlantic Ocean waters along the U.S. East Coast, from Delaware to central Florida.
The research involves periodic blasts from compressed air guns, which send out sound waves that penetrate the sea floor. When the sound waves bounce back, they are captured by sensors towed behind seismic vessels. The resulting data is used to produce detailed, three-dimensional maps of underground geological features.
Conservationists say the blasts are so loud they jeopardize the hearing of dolphins, cause whales to beach themselves and disrupt animals’ mating and feeding habits. Scientists have warned that the surveys could cause long-lasting damage to marine animals, including the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale.
Now there’s a hole in the sky
And the ground’s not cold
And if the ground’s not cold, everything is gonna burn
We’ll all take turns, I’ll get mine too — The Pixies, This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven
In a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration said that on its current course, the planet will warm 7 degrees by the end of this century.
A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Cape Charles and much of the Eastern Shore would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe.
The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. Assumed within the report is that it is too late to do anything–our fate is sealed.
The document projects that global temperature will rise by nearly 3.5 degrees Celsius above the average temperature between 1986 and 2005 regardless of whether Obama-era tailpipe standards take effect or are frozen for six years, as the Trump administration has proposed. The global average temperature rose more than 0.5 degrees Celsius between 1880, the start of industrialization, and 1986, so the analysis assumes a roughly 4 degree Celsius or 7 degree Fahrenheit increase from preindustrial levels.
The world would have to make deep cuts in carbon emissions to avoid this drastic warming,the analysis states. And that “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”
VIRGINIA BEACH — The Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center and its Stranding Response Team releasedd five rehabilitated turtles back into the Atlantic Ocean.
Four of the five (Wisteria, Honeysuckle, Captain, and Poppy) were Kemp’s ridley sea turtles and all four were inadvertently hooked by fishermen.
Also released was Drake, a Loggerhead who was found “cold-stunned” in the Chesapeake Bay on New Year’s Day.
The Mysterious Kemp’s ridley
The Kemp’s ridley is the most endangered of all sea turtle species. Efforts to save this turtle began in the 1960s and have continued to today. Since those efforts began, much has been learned about the Kemp’s ridley. Many more questions remain unanswered.
The Kemp’s ridley has always been a mystery. Sailors, explorers, and fishermen had seen other kinds of sea turtles coming up to nest on beaches in various places around the world but it seemed no one had seen a Kemp’s ridley nest. Some thought it might not even be a species. They suggested it was a hybrid, an infertile offspring of two other species. But when fishermen caught some Kemp’s ridley sea turtles with eggs inside them, the riddle deepened. If these turtles were a separate species, where did they nest?
In 1951, the first published record of a Kemp’s ridley nesting anywhere in the world was submitted by J.E. Werler. The turtle was seen nesting in 1948 on what would later be designated as Padre Island National Seashore.
But there were thousands of Kemp’s ridley turtles out in the Gulf of Mexico at that time. Where did the majority of them nest? Finally, in the early 1960s, Dr. Henry Hidebrand from Corpus Christi, Texas, came upon some home video footage that would solve the mystery and launch an international campaign to save a species.
Architect Andreas Herrera traveled between the U.S. and Mexico regularly in the 1940s. He had his own small plane and usually flew along the coast. He had heard rumors that hundreds of turtles sometimes crawled up onto one of the beaches he flew over. He was interested in seeing these turtles, and started taking a video camera with him on his trips in case he ever saw them.
One summer day in 1947, he looked down as he flew over an area in Mexico called Rancho Nuevo and saw a beach covered with turtles. Excited, he found a place to land his small plane, got his video camera, and captured the turtles on film.
That video footage wasn’t discovered by the scientific community until the early 1960s, when Dr. Hildebrand saw it. Scientists were amazed – nothing like it had ever been seen. Thousands of sea turtles were on the beach, digging holes and laying eggs. There were so many turtles, some even dug up the eggs of others as they laid their own. The scientists estimated that 40,000 female Kemp’s ridley sea turtles had come ashore to nest on that one day on the 16-mile stretch of beach at Rancho Nuevo (Hildebrand 1963).
Finally, the mystery was solved and the nesting grounds of the Kemp’s ridley became known to the scientific world. But with the good news came the bad: this species was and still is in serious trouble.
The 1947 film footage taken by Andreas Herrera showed the incredible mass nesting of tens of thousands of Kemp’s ridley sea turtles on the beach at Rancho Nuevo in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Unfortunately, it also showed mass destruction. Scientists reviewing the footage in the 1960s saw people taking the turtles’ eggs as they were laid and loading them by the millions into trucks. Some of the nesting females were also taken. The scientists estimated that 90% of the turtle nests were destroyed the same day they were laid.
If 90% of the nests laid were being destroyed, how long could the species survive? How long had this wholesale destruction been going on? Conservationists and scientists traveled to Rancho Nuevo and found the turtles were still nesting each year but had already declined dramatically since the film was taken years earlier. They appealed to the Mexican government to stop the wholesale destruction that was still taking place.
In 1966, the Mexican government took action. They passed legislation protecting the beach at Rancho Nuevo and brought in guards to stop the taking of eggs and turtles. Despite these protection efforts, the number of Kemp’s ridley nests found each year continued to drop. By 1985, only 702 nests were found worldwide the entire year.
In 2011, several thousand Kemp’s ridley sea turtles came ashore to nest in one day at Rancho Nuevo in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Such mass nesting events, called arribadas, happen several times each summer.
Photo from National Marine Fisheries Service, taken by Toni Torres of the Gladys Porter Zoo
In the 1970s, the U.S. joined efforts to save this species. At the time, almost all known nesting of Kemp’s ridley sea turtles was occurring at Rancho Nuevo. Nearly all Kemp’s ridley eggs were literally in one basket! What if a hurricane, oil spill, or other disaster wiped out that beach? The species was very vulnerable. The situation was dire.
In 1974, the National Park Service proposed re-establishing a nesting colony at Padre Island National Seashore (PINS). The seashore is part of the native nesting range of the Kemp’s ridley and offers long-term protection for the turtle, its nests, and its nesting habitat. Boosting nesting at PINS would help to re-establish a nesting colony at the northern end of the Kemp’s ridley historic nesting range at a protected area in the U.S. where nesting had previously occurred. It would also provide safeguards against species extinction.
In 1978, agency officials from Mexico and the U.S. and conservationists agreed to attempt to re-establish a secondary nesting colony at PINS to help save the species. They formed an international, multi-agency partnership and established the Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle Restoration and Enhancement Program (KRREP). The National Park Service led development of an action plan for the KRREP. The goals of th eplan were to re-establish a Kemp’s ridley nesting colony at PINS and to protect nesting turtles, eggs, and hatchlings at Rancho Nuevo (Caillouet et al. 2015, Shaver and Caillouet 2015).
This project was based on the theory that sea turtles imprint to their natal beach and that, as a result of this imprinting, adult females return to the beach where they hatched to lay their eggs. This theory was unproven at the time, and no project of this magnitude had been attempted before. But the Kemp’s ridley was on the verge of extinction, and bold actions were needed to save the species.
Conservation efforts to save and recover the Kemp’s ridley have continued and expanded over the years since the Imprinting and Headstarting Project ended in 1988. In Texas, organized patrols to find and protect Kemp’s ridley and other sea turtle nests are now conducted not only at PINS but also in many other areas along the Texas coast. Through these programs, conducted by the National Seashore and many partners, Texas beaches are monitored each summer and any nesting sea turtles or nests found are protected. In Mexico, nest detection and protection programs that began at Rancho Nuevo have also increased and expanded to include most of the species nesting range in Mexico.