2/4/24
OCEAN POLLUTION : EPIC RAIN STORMS, RIVERS, and CRUISE SHIPS
As we wait on a deluge of rain, possibly as much rain as is usually expected in a six month period, in just two or three days, as people in various parts of Southern California - Ventura County, Sun Valley in the San Fernando Valley, and Long Beach in Southern Los Angeles County, are asked to evacuate or be prepared for flooding, I'm confident that the home I live in will not flood. However, these storms always end in pollution being rushed into the ocean. Two rivers, the San Gabriel and the Los Angeles empty into the Pacific not far from here. Rivers are the way that most plastic pollution enter the ocean. However, I also believe that cruise ships are using the ocean as a toilet and dump. I believe that the massive ships that hold thousands of passengers are responsible for killing marine animals both by dumping, by collision, and by fuel pollution.
Intense rainstorms are the result of Climate Change. Here at Siren's Link to Sea BlogSpot, I use the term Climate Change rather than Global Warming, because I'm not entirely convinced that we aren't actually moving into another Ice Age.
1/25/23
DID YOU KNOW THAT OCEAN DOLPHINS DO NOT LIKE FRESH WATER?
Dolphins will enter rivers that feed into the salty ocean but usually turn back where the fresh water and salt water meet, so they are not in LAKES, not even the GREAT LAKES...
OCEAN DOLPHIN SKIN NEEDS THE SALT WATER TO STAY HEALTHY...
but, it might have something to do also with the kinds of fish they like to eat.
Reports that dolphins were returning to Lake Erie were false,
6/23/22
MUDLARK by LARA MAIKLEM - SIREN's LINK TO SEA BOOK REVIEW - SEA FOSSILS
What a fascinating book. For those of you who like to go to the water's edge and see what you can find - besides sea shells and sea weeds washed ashore - this book may inspire you to think ahead about where you can go and why. Lara Maiklem's hobby as a mudlark, a person who finds things washed up by river tides, has made her an expert about the way the Thames River, the river that goes through the city of London to the ocean, flows. Most surprising to me was that this is a river that has tides. With the ebb and flow of the tides, various objects have been deposited, others have no doubt been washed out to sea for hundreds of years. So she and other mudlarkers make it a point of frequently visiting various areas where the river flows to see what has been brought up, what is embedded, and her finds include ancient coins, painted tiles, and a variety of objects like needles, pins, thimbles, and beads, religious objects and weapons. As most of these objects were made of natural materials - not plastic - they don't threaten the living creatures of those waters so much though of course there is a history of sea creatures becoming extinct over time. It's those creatures though that I want to excerpt about.
Page 53 Excerpt: Encased in clay and lying among the gravel on the foreshore are the fossilized remains of the creatures that inhabited those prehistoric seas. The pencil-like internal shells of belemnites, ancient extinct squid, that swam in shoals over 66 million years ago; bivalves the size and shape of cockles, frozen in stone; and 'devil's toenails', an extinct form of marine oyster that lived in the sediment of the seabed. At Warden's Point on the Estuary, fossilized crabs, lobsters, shells, twigs, and shark teeth fall from the low cliffs of London clay onto the beach where they can be collected by the handful, and occasionally smoothed pieces of yellow amber will wash ashore where the Estuary and the North Sea mingle. Years ago, before people knew what fossils were, they were shrouded in folklore and assigned all kinds of quasi-religious and mystical associations. One of the most commonly found fossils in the south of England, and along the Thames' foreshore, are echinoids. The colloquial name for echinoid is 'sea urchin', which comes from the old country name for hedgehog....
11/23/20
SALMON and RIVERENE FISH - DAM DEMOLITIONS LEADS TO NATURAL HABITATS
LA TIMES : LARGE DAMS TO BE DEMOLISH - A VICTORY FOR FISH
Excerpt: If it goes forward, the deal would revive plants to remove four massive hydroelectric dams on the lower Klamath River, emptying giant reservoirs and reopening potential fish habitation that's been blocked for more than a century. The massive project would be at the vanguard of a trend toward dam demotions in the U.S. as the structures age and become less economically viable amid growing environmental concerns about the health of native fish.