May 05, 2010

A global environmental update

In an effort to halt a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a giant iron funnel is to be deployed to the seabed – at a previously untried depth of 1,500 metres -- the BBC said. Two weeks after an offshore rig exploded in the gulf, the spill off the US coast threatens to wreak environmental disaster and wipe out the livelihoods of shoreline communities, Agence France-Presse reported.

Europe’s SMOS spacecraft is returning valuable new data on the way water is cycled around the globe, despite continued radio-frequency interference, according to the BBC. The satellite was launched last November to track changes in the wetness of soils and the saltiness of the oceans.

A dispute over water resources is fueling tensions between India and Pakistan at a time when the countries are trying to rebuild trust, the Associated Press reported. Pakistani militants allege that India is stealing water from glacier-fed rivers originating in Kashmir, but independent experts say there is no evidence to support those claims.

More than a third of honeybee colonies in the United States have failed to survive the winter, adding to evidence that the bees are in terminal decline, The Observer reported. The collapse of colonies worldwide is a major threat to crops.

Spain’s fishing fleet, Europe’s largest, is using massive European Union subsidies to “plunder” the world’s oceans, Agence France-Presse quoted a Greenpeace report as saying.

A deal under which Britain’s wind farm industry will spend millions of dollars on advanced radar-defence systems has cleared the way for an increase in the country’s renewable energy supply, according to The Guardian. Some objections to wind projects have been over interference from turbines that can baffle air-traffic control and defence systems.

In the United States, a plan to build the country’s first offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound, off the Massachusetts coast, was approved after years of reviews and legal appeals, the Financial Times reported.

Melting sea ice has dramatically accelerated warming in the Arctic, where temperatures have risen faster in recent decades than the global average, Agence France-Presse said, citing a study in Nature. In other findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers said the world’s floating ice is in “constant retreat”, showing an instability that will increase global sea levels, Science Daily reported.

Russian and Norway struck a deal that equally divides the long-contested Barents Sea between them, Deutsche Welle reported. The agreement ends decades of negotiation over the area, believed to be rich in oil and gas deposits.