News from Across the American Shoreline

Recovery from Hurricane Ida is still underway in southeast Louisiana, where the climate crisis hangs a question mark over the future. People in Louisiana are already preparing for rising seas and intensifying storms, offering models for the rest of us. So, will New Orleans be under water someday? Mike Ludwig speaks to Jessica Dandridge, Executive Director of the Greater New Orleans Water Collaborative, to find out.

NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science awarded $1.7 million of an anticipated $5.9 million over the next four to five years for three research projects to investigate species’ habitat usage and connectivity in and around national marine sanctuaries in the Florida Keys, Flower Garden Banks, and Stellwagen Bank.

The organization that promotes Mississippi’s biggest tourist destination — the three counties along the Gulf Coast — is on the brink of collapse following a string of leadership resignations, in-fighting over county representation and public name-calling.

McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) — A group of South Texas environmentalists sued the Texas General Land Office and Cameron County for allowing the repeated closure of Boca Chica Beach, on the border with Mexico, for SpaceX tests.

A frontier mentality has been a defining aspect of human history. Often this sentiment is optimistically framed in the language of aspirations and opportunities. But it can also be accompanied by unsavory narratives of over-exploitation, inequity, and conflict (1).

At the recommendation of Oregon’s coastal legislators, Gov. Kate Brown issued a formal request on Oct. 4 to the U.S. Department of Commerce for federal disaster relief for Oregon’s commercial salmon industry. This request comes in response to diminished salmon landings for the 2018, 2019, and 2020 seasons.

This is the second in a series of articles exploring the recent resurgence of the recreational boating industry. This part of the series looks at restricted areas.

PORT FOURCHON, Louisiana, Oct 14 (Reuters) - On Louisiana’s south coast, in a key port servicing the U.S. offshore oil industry, a huge shipyard sits idle and in tatters. Where parts of the nine-bay terminal’s roof once hung, only a tangle of twisted metal beams is now visible while a side of the building is caved in.

RGGI money earmarked for flood preparedness begins to flow to local governments

Wales: Are our beaches and wildlife being put at risk?

After Hurricane Ida, New Orleanians are weighing the emotional, cultural, and financial costs of leaving the place they call home.

Oak Island Town Council has approved a $17.5-million contract with Great Lakes Dredge and Dock to put sand along the western portions of the shore this winter.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the federal-state Chesapeake Bay Program partnership today announced more than $10 million in grants for projects that will protect and restore the Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding watershed.

Richard W. Spinrad is the first Senate-confirmed administrator of NOAA in five years, which has its advantages in Washington.

The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) plans to organise up to seven new offshore wind lease sales by 2025, according to the country’s Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.

Symbiotic relationship between Pacific Ocean coral species offers a potential solution to restore climate-damaged reefs

Investors could lose trillions of dollars as the climate crisis hits oceans, the WWF has said. An estimated $8.4 trillion of assets and revenues are at risk from rising temperatures. The financial community is embracing green investing ahead of the COP26 summit.

Symbiotic relationship between Pacific Ocean coral species offers a potential solution to restore climate-damaged reefs

“The dataset is important because it captures near immediate perishable evidence of the performance of the built environment after Hurricane Michael,” Kijewski-Correa said. “It broadly assesses building performance over a large expanse of the impacted area and over a wide range of structural typologies.”

It has been 45 days since Hurricane Ida lashed Terrebonne and Lafourche and Kayin Chaisson still doesn’t have power.

Four Projects Will Support Environmental Monitoring and Advance Federal Goal to Deploy 30 Gigawatts of Offshore Wind by 2030

A lethal enemy breeds near the bottom of the sea. It rises from the ocean like a red blob when the time comes, and the dead husks and shells of large sea creatures wash ashore. First, it comes for the fish, then the sea turtles, and ultimately the coastal tourism economy.

Tens of thousands of wooden stakes poking up from British Columbia's shoreline have smashed a long-held stereotype of Canada's First Nation people.

U.S. senators on Wednesday promoted a federal hurricane system’s performance in New Orleans during Hurricane Ida, but noted that other regions experienced devastation that is likely to worsen as climate change produces more intense and frequent storms.

(The Center Square) – Many Florida property insurers are seeking double-digit rate hikes citing ballooning reinsurance costs, “loss creep” from 2017-18 hurricanes, coastal flooding and litigation.

Hurricanes and other intense storms impact marshes in a variety of different ways. Storms can be a major source of sediment deposition, which in turn increases marsh elevation and resilience to sea-level rise. Wave action and inundation can also cause significant vegetation loss, edge erosion and other marsh degradation, including pond formation. Understanding how marshes are impacted by major storms is imperative to understanding system-wide coastal resistance and resilience.

Pelicans, egrets, herons, ibis, terns, and other colonial water birds built about 6,100 nests on Rabbit Island — more than 16 times the number biologists had expected, a news release from the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority said.

The service is preparing to release a new climate strategy with four key lines of effort, according to a memo obtained by Defense News outlining the plan.

This past May, biologists from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation found something that looked quite small and inconsequential to those of us who might only fish in the Great Lakes, but something that was huge and quite important to scientists like them that spend their entire lives staring into the into largest freshwater basin on the planet.

The Navy hires biologists and oceanographers to assess and document its environmental impact, but many of those impacts remain unknown.

With warming climate, summer sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking fast, and now consistently spans less than half the area it did in the early 1980s. This raises the question: It this keeps up, in the future will year-round sea ice—and the creatures who need it to survive—persist anywhere?

IT might be being billed as the multimillion-dollar solution to coastal erosion, but some residents say construction of a giant sea wall in Collaroy and Narrabeen should be stopped immediately.

Hurricane Ida swept through Louisiana with furious winds that ripped roofs off buildings and storm surge so powerful it moved homes. What it wrought on the living it also wrought on the dead, moving vaults and caskets and adding another layer of trauma for families and communities recovering from the powerful storm.

The southeastern coast of the United States is threatened yearly by hurricanes, some receiving more media coverage and resources than others. Coastal states such as Florida experience more hurricane impacts than other states and thus the greatest labor market disruptions from these disasters.

WASHINGTON -- FEMA published a notice today in the Federal Register seeking public comment on the National Flood Insurance Program’s (NFIP) minimum floodplain management standards.

As the largest U.S. bank and a major lender to the fossil fuel industry, JPMorgan has been criticized for not joining the group, which launched in April, sooner. The announcement comes ahead of next month's UN Climate Change Conference, known as COP 26, in Glasgow.

While much of the focus has been on the challenges shippers and carriers are having at getting imports offloaded at their destination ports and delivered, there are also growing backlogs at Chinese factories and ports.

In rural Japan, the unstoppable forces of nature meet the immovable determination of the construction state. Can this village survive? (Paywall Applies)

New Research Suggests That Non-Native Mangroves On Hawaii's Moloka'i Island Provide Beneficial Ecosystem Services.

Port commissioners on Tuesday approved a contract with a locally based dredging company to begin work on an extensive, multi-phase project to expand the Houston Ship Channel, delaying the start by three months so the company can bring in a less-polluting dredge and retrofit other equipment to reduce harmful air emissions.

Conditions causing low oxygen and harmful algae blooms in Long Island waters — including on the East End — have become a “new normal,” according to this year’s water quality report from Stony Brook University scientist Christopher Gobler.

Congress is holding hearings today, tomorrow and Monday about potential law changes over the spill, which is drawing scrutiny of the original 1979 permit records obtained by Voice of OC.

This week, a host of different state and federal officeholders are launching investigations and oversight hearings after last week’s oil spill off of OC’s coast. Could their action spur the next environmental movement?

Collier commissioners unanimously agreed Tuesday to spend nearly $5 million to renourish three county beach areas with work set to begin late this month.

Steering the ship from her perch 93 feet above the Arctic waterline, U.S. Coast Guard Ensign Valerie Hines guides the vessel through ice cover laid out like a vast white puzzle starting to tear apart.

Virginia is a hot spot of climate change. We have the highest sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast, and we have more storms that are hitting the coast now than at any previous time,” environmental scientist Karen McGlathery said.

A friend recently sent me an aerial photo of Sardinia’s La Maddalena archipelago, taken from an helicopter in August, and I had to look four times before I realized what those hundreds of tiny white dots were.

There’s some truth behind age-old flood myths (even Noah’s Ark and Atlantis).

Alaska’s limited-entry commercial fisheries system may be pulling access to fisheries away from the coastal communities where they take place.

HONOLULU, HI (STL.News) The options available to land managers and owners of coastal properties facing serious beach erosion are limited, expensive, and unlikely to provide permanent fixes. That’s one of the conclusions of a presentation to the Board of Land and Natural Resources last Friday.

Yale researchers are charting the course of mighty “rivers” in the sky that are holding steady in the face of climate change — for now.

A new high-tech buoy that measures wave height and direction, and provides mariners with real-time weather information intended to improve navigational safety, will be installed soon in Buzzards Bay.

If another Hurricane Isabel hit the Chesapeake Bay area a few decades from now, it could affect at least a million more people and cause $6 billion more in damage than when it landed in 2003, new research suggests.

Strolling home from a beach yoga session near Lifeguard Tower 14, not far from the crews working to contain the massive oil spill from an offshore pipe, Julie Green passed a vestige of her city’s petroleum-steeped history.

On October 6, the second China (Rushan) Oyster Industry Summit Forum was held successfully in Rushan, Shandong.

(Norway) - The Northern Lights joint venture has awarded contracts for the construction of two dedicated CO2 carriers to Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co., Ltd.

RAYMONDVILLE, TEXAS – Willacy County Judge Aurelio ‘Keter’ Guerra says deepening Port Mansfield’s ship channel to allow for ocean-going barge traffic can be a “game changer” for his county’s economic fortunes.

The annual Conference of the Parties (COP) presents an opportunity for actors in the public, private and civil sectors of society to come together and create solutions towards anthropogenic climate change.

The planet is warming rapidly, resulting in historic drought, deadly floods and unusual melting events in the Arctic. It is also causing steady sea level rise, which scientists say will continue for decades.

CHATHAM COUNTY, Ga. (WTOC) - The flood insurance rates for properties are changing.

If a major flood happened tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of homes, commercial buildings, roads and critical infrastructure across New England are at risk of damage, according to a new report by the First Street Foundation. And the dangers are only expected to grow over the next 30 years.

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University have been awarded $5.4 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to continue their study of climate change and variability risks in the larger Great Lakes region for the next five years.

The U.S. Navy is at war against a surging sea. It has yet to notch a victory.

Three miles deep along the floor of the abyssal plains of the global oceans, trillions of black, round, rock-like nuggets are scattered and amassed. These rocks, called Polymetallic Nodules, are similar in size and appearance to partially burned charcoal briquettes and are a mixture of nickel, cobalt, manganese, and other rare earth metals.

Sustainable Marine Energy has commissioned Seasystems to supply adjustable mooring tensioners for the 420kW PLAT-I tidal energy platform that will be installed in the Bay of Fundy in Canada.

With the health of the ocean under threat, a rallying cry for marine conservation goes global. Here is a good-news story

Winston Churchill once said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” The same happens with the replenishment of beaches.

The Oregon coast is known for its stunning beauty. But under the surface, these cold ocean currents support one of the most productive ecosystems on the planet — and because of that, one of the largest fishing fleets on the west coast.

Experts and environmental advocates say this aging infrastructure will likely spark more disasters in the years ahead — as oil companies face an uncertain future, are reluctant to invest in upgrades, and hand off assets to smaller and smaller companies.

As a massive investment to repair roads and adapt to climate change faces an uncertain fate in Congress, a new report finds much of the country's infrastructure is already at risk of being shut down by flooding. And as the planet heats up, the threat is expected to grow.

The United States saw an unprecedented 18 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the first nine months of the year, according to scientists with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information.

A new proposal would track lobster boats in federal waters to collect data that protects commercial fisheries against developers

With offshore floating wind as a proven commercial reality, the challenges associated with the industry are now focused on delivering at scale, but there are still key innovation issues to be resolved across the industry.

Blooms of toxic algae in the North Sea are being investigated as one potential cause behind the “dreadful” death of thousands of seabirds along the east coast.

The Arctic sea ice has suffered devastating loss and has shrunk to its second lowest on record. Melting sea ice is just one of many signs of a warming climate in the North. Emanuela Campanella explains how climate change is rapidly transforming the Arctic Circle. – Sep 22, 2020

For Scott Maurer, working in the oyster industry in southeast Louisiana lately has just been hit after hit.

The new rule is part of an effort to decrease flood zones in at-risk areas.

Farmers as a group don’t typically embrace change. Just ask Luis Lombana, CEO of Ficosterra, a Spanish marine biotechnology company that makes fertilizers from an unexpected source: seaweed.

Setting coastal and inland needs against each other is wrong

BAY COUNTY — For Mexico Beach Mayor Al Cathey, the days leading up to Oct. 10, 2018, were just like any normal storm preparation — gather names of who is staying, board up windows and lock down loose items around town.

New York City has long been a leader among cities when it comes to tackling climate change.

PRINCESS ANNE, Md.- NOAA has announced that it will continue its two-decade commitment to support the next generation of marine scientists and researchers at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.

At 656 feet long and big enough to haul more than 4,000 automobiles, the hulking Golden Ray ship has been hard to miss in the St. Simons Sound, where it laid on its side for more than two years.

The first turbine jacket foundation has been installed at Seagreen, Scotland’s largest and the world’s deepest, fixed bottom offshore wind farm. Each jacket foundation will support a Vestas V164-10 MW turbine.

North Carolina may owe Florida an apology. The lionfish invasion plaguing waters off Florida may have begun in North Carolina, according to a new study from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Underwater power cables may be having a mesmerizing effect on brown crabs, causing them to lethargically linger around the seafloor longer than they should, a new study has found. Most concerningly, electromagnetic fields emitted by the cables appear to lead to cellular changes in the edible crabs, potentially making them more vulnerable to infections and affecting their migration habits.

A complex series of railways, roads, bridges and waterways connects U.S. farmers to the rest of the word, but this system is deteriorating and threatens U.S. agriculture’s leading global position. Luckily some much-needed investments are in process, such as the Mississippi River Ship Channel Dredging Project.

Scientists at Stony Brook University have completed their assessment of water quality in Long Island's estuaries in 2021 and the news is not good. During the months of June through October, every major bay and estuary across Long Island was afflicted by toxic algae blooms and oxygen-starved, dead zones.

Once again, California State Parks has been caught violating rules aimed at protecting threatened and endangered shore birds at the Oceano Dunes off-road vehicle park.

Caves at John Smith’s Bay are set to be largely filled in after slightly scaled-down plans to address coastal erosion at the beach were approved.

(CNN). Swimming deep in the Pacific Ocean, a group of little-known killer whales that eat large sea mammals including grey whale calves has been found, researchers say.

Warmer waters allowed species to move far past their usual northern boundaries

Congested ports. Clogged supply chains. Capacity shortages. Much of Hapag-Lloyd CEO Rolf Habben Jansen’s third-quarter overview had a familiar refrain, one likely to be heard again after the fourth quarter.

Almost eight years after Typhoon Haiyan barreled into Busuanga Island in the western Philippines, the lesson it left is still etched in the mind of village leader Annabel Dela Cruz. For her and other Indigenous women in the village of Quezon on Busuanga’s northern coast, keeping their mangrove forest intact is now seen as a matter of survival amid the climate crisis.

Redeveloping and improving shoreline protection in urban areas is a significant infrastructure need in the United States. These areas are subject to continual damage due to storms, rising waters and the effects of climate change.

A warming climate leads to greater weather extremes and impacts the distribution of marine life in North Carolina’s coastal waters, scientists say.

A Texas A&M urban planning professor will head a group to examine virtual models of Galveston Island and other Texas coastal communities in a large-scale study.

The ecosystems’ benefits to people and nature should boost appeal to funders

People who live on Grand Isle have endured decades of destruction, and they've always rebuilt. This time might be different.

In 2010, the world’s attention was captured when Deep Water Horizon, the world’s largest marine oil spill, began spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. While this crisis was ongoing, there had been a silent, arguably even deadlier, environmental concern severely affecting the Gulf’s coastal ecosystems: ocean acidification.