I was jumping around some of the Olympic blogs and came across these pics on McNay-Biehls’ 470 Blog. (Hope you don’t mind me borrowing your photos guys but these are frickin’ scary). First the fog now this. How the bloody hell are they going to sort this out? It’s not like it’s going to stop growing. If anything it will get worse. If it’s like Chesapeake Bay, there will be dead fish floating all over the place too.
In their blog McNay and Biehl reference an article that I think this probably spurred the NY Times article today. This one is unbelievable.
I saw an item about this on the television news. Heavy equipment was hauling this green stuff away by the dump-truck load, and it still didn’t seem to make a difference. Some members of the US Olympic sailing team were interviewed, and they said sailing in this stuff was a nightmare, and that it smelled like dead fish.
Now, I’m not a trained environmental scientist, but I have heard that algae blooms are caused at least in part by pollution. Yeah, maybe the Chinese are trying to clean things up in time for the Olympics — the air quality gets the most press — but out in the ocean, what they can do seems to be too little, too late.
It’s entirely pollution-driven. Raw sewage is dumped into the sea, fertilizing the carp (no pun intended) out of the algae, which blooms like it’s on steroids. The smell of dead fish will be dead fish. The excessive algae chokes out the O2 in the water and the fish are starved of it.
It happens on a smaller scale in Chesapeake Bay.
One other interesting thought … does anybody remember the 1980s, when blue-green algae was the latest hot nutritional supplement? Maybe the Chinese ought to revive that trend, and export pollution-based vitamins, rather than industrial-chemical-laced pet food and lead-tainted children’s toys.
Human activities and fertilizer run-off these mostly are the cause of this toxic algae that can lead to fish kill, this really a disgusting matter.
It looks impressive, I thought that I was picture from a park. Because it does look like one. Specially for the kind of green that It has.