Join them as they “journey across the nation, looking at the nine different regions the NOAA Marine Debris Program spans and the most common types of debris found in them, and how it may have ended up there.”
So far, they have visited the following places:
Alaska, where remote beaches, rough seas, and limited fair weather mean volunteers have only a few months each year to remove anywhere from one to 25 tons of debris per mile of shoreline.
Pacific Islands, where Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and a whole lot of open ocean make up the largest region NOAA supports, but where there is so little space for landfills that NOAA helped establish a public-private partnership in Hawaii to turn abandoned fishing gear into a local electricity source.
California, where its 1,100 miles of shoreline vary from coastal mountains in the north to well-populated, sandy beaches in the south, and where the nation’s first “Trash Policy” will attempt to control the flow of garbage in California’s waterways.
Stay tuned as they continue working their way around the shores of the United States, and ask yourself, what does marine debris look like where you live? How do you help keep it out of the ocean?
And remember, even if you live hundreds of miles from a beach, a piece of litter such as a cigarette butt (which actually contains plastic) or a plastic bag can still make its way through storm drains and rivers to the ocean. This makes marine debris, no matter where you live, truly everyone’s problem.
The San Miguel Natural Reserve in Puerto Rico is made up of 422 acres of protected coastal lands and was acquired to compensate the public after a barge ran aground, damaging coral and spilling oil near San Juan in 1994. (NOAA)
Spending time at the beach is reported to be one of America’s favorite vacation memories [PDF]. So, when our coasts become polluted, the effects can seem both traumatic and personal: damaged habitats; dirtied water; injured birds, fish, wildlife, and plants; and blemished places where we boat, fish, and play. But thanks to NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, we help reverse these impacts—whether from an oil spill, toxic chemicals, or marine debris—through our scientific solutions for protecting and restoring our favorite natural places.
To celebrate National Travel and Tourism Week (May 4-12), we have gathered a few examples of the places you can visit that our office is helping protect and restore.
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Sandy beaches, swaying palm trees, and turquoise waters—Puerto Rico is the quintessential tropical vacation destination. Besides surfing, snorkeling, and swimming at its more than 270 miles of beaches, this Caribbean island offers jungle adventures, resort relaxation, and Spanish colonial history. But on an island only 110 miles long and 40 miles wide, the ocean is never far away.
On January 7, 1994, just before dawn, a barge the length of a football field plowed into the picturesque surf near San Juan, Puerto Rico. When it grounded, the Tank Barge Morris J. Berman damaged coral reefs and spilled 800,000 gallons of a thick, black fuel oil into the deep blue waters off Puerto Rico’s Atlantic coast. After the grounding, the barge continued to leak, spilling more than 85,000 gallons of oily water as it was towed offshore and scuttled (intentionally sunk) 23 miles northeast of San Juan. About 169 miles of ocean and bay shorelines were affected by the spilled oil, disrupting beachgoers, boaters, and sportfishers for up to three months in some areas. The oil also crept onto the shoreline of several historic sites, including San Juan National Historic Site, a National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site. And in the end, nearly 111,000 square feet of coral reef were damaged from the grounded barge and subsequent response measures.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration was involved in a variety of activities from the start: forecasting the oil’s spread, performing aerial surveys of the spill, assessing impacted shorelines, and advising the Coast Guard on potential environmental impacts of sinking the leaking barge. Our involvement carried beyond spill cleanup and extended to evaluating and determining how the spill injured natural resources, which included people’s use of them. To compensate the public for the spill’s impacts, we helped implement a suite of projects focused on restoring damaged reefs, recreational beach use, and lost tourism at San Juan National Historic Site.
To begin restoring the coral ecosystems, NOAA and our partners built the Condado Coral Reef Trail, comprised of three underwater educational trails adjacent to a public beach. Along each trail, we placed ten pre-made artificial cement reefs, intended to establish similar reef habitat to that damaged by the barge grounding. This project wrapped up in the fall of 2008 and provides an incredible first-hand opportunity to learn about coral reefs and restoring natural resources in Puerto Rico.
San Francisco, California
According to the San Francisco Travel Association, more than 16.5 million visitors traveled to San Francisco, Calif., in 2012. Known as the “City by the Bay,” San Francisco is closely connected to its maritime heritage and marine resources. Fisherman’s Wharf is a popular northern waterfront area home to the city’s fleet of fishing boats, many of whose owners have been fishing there for three generations and bringing in the fresh seafood both locals and tourists savor. The Golden Gate Bridge, the city’s most iconic bridge, links San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean and its bustling maritime commerce.
Point Bonita is in the foreground, looking across sheens of oil (lighter colored) from the Cosco Busan spill and eastward to Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay. (NOAA)
But on the typically foggy morning of November 7, 2007, the 900-foot cargo ship Cosco Busan slammed against the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and caused one of the largest oil spills in the bay’s history. Scraping a 100-foot-long gash into the vessel’s side, the crash released 53,000 gallons of a thick fuel oil, which quickly dispersed into the surrounding waters and onto sensitive coastline both in the bay and along the outer coast. Similar to our efforts after the barge grounding in Puerto Rico, NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration provided forecasts of the oil’s path, aerial oil surveys, oiled shoreline assessment, and other scientific support for the spill response.
In the foreground, the Bay Bridge tower that was hit by the M/V Cosco Busan, spilling oil into San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Photo: November 9, 2007 (NOAA)
NOAA and our partners determined that, as a result, the incident oiled more than 3,300 acres of shoreline habitat, killed an estimated 6,849 birds and thousands of herring, and lost an estimated 1,079,900 possible recreational days for individuals. In addition, it temporarily closed a dozen urban beaches [PDF], and even shoreline along Alcatraz Island, a National Park and home to the infamous prison, suffered heavy oiling after the spill. More than $30 million was awarded from the company responsible to restore injured birds, fish, eelgrass vegetation, habitat, and lost outdoor recreation.
The bulk of these funds (tentatively $18.8 million) is allocated for a slew of improvements benefiting Bay Area recreational activities, such as picnicking, hiking, surfing, kiteboarding, fishing, and boating. These projects will take place in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Point Reyes National Seashore, and other areas of the East Bay and San Mateo and Marin County. They range from improving beach and fishing access and enhancing trails and shorelines to repairing waterfront park infrastructure and supporting lifeguard and educational programs. Restoration is expected to begin in the summer of 2013, helping turn back the harmful effects of this oil spill on the City by the Bay.
Olympic Coast, Washington
A landscape view of the rugged Washington coast, with cleanup workers dismantling the dock and removing plastic foam to the right. Photo: March 18, 2013 (National Park Service/John Gussman)
Visitors flock each year to Washington’s breathtaking Olympic Peninsula to go hiking, camping, kayaking, and harvesting clams and oysters (just for starters). Driving the 350 miles along the Pacific Coast Scenic Byway, you can access an impressive amount of diversity along this state’s coast. From foggy sea stacks poking out of the Pacific Ocean to giant red cedars standing sentinel in old-growth forests to tide pools populated with vibrant orange and purple starfish, this coast abounds with natural wonders.
In December of 2012, however, a remote portion of the Olympic Coast received an unusual “visitor”: a 185 ton, 65-foot floating dock. Swept away from the Port of Misawa during Japan’s 2011 tsunami, it ended up beached within NOAA’s Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary and a designated wilderness portion of Olympic National Park. The dock was built out of plastic foam housed in steel-reinforced concrete, which had been damaged as changing tides and waves continued to shift the dock’s placement in the surf. A threat to the environment, visitors, and wildlife, its foam was escaping to the surrounding beach and waters, where it could have been eaten by the coast’s whales, seals, birds, and fish.
Staging the dock’s plastic foam for transport, when it was transferred off the coast via helicopter. Photo: March 18, 2013 (National Park Service/John Gussman)
According to the Washington Department of Ecology website, “the intertidal area of the Olympic Coast is home to the most diverse ecosystem of marine invertebrates and seaweeds on the west coast of North America … Leaving the dock in place could [have] result[ed] in the release of over 200 cubic yards of foam into federally protected waters and wilderness coast.”
Fortunately, in March 2013, the National Park Service and NOAA worked with a local salvage company to dismantle and remove this hazard to the coast, using both federal money and a generous donation from Japan to fund the project and ensuring the Olympic Coast’s visitors can enjoy its healthy habitats for years to come.
To learn more about NOAA’s work protecting the coastal places we love to visit, go to response.restoration.noaa.gov.
This is a post by Gabrielle Dorr,NOAA/Montrose Settlements Restoration Program Outreach Coordinator.
A-49, also known as “Princess Cruz,” in her nest on Santa Cruz Island. She was the first Bald Eagle chick hatched naturally on California’s Santa Cruz Island in over 50 years. (Photo Credit: Peter Sharpe, Institute for Wildlife Studies)
We want you to take a bird’s eye view of restoration with our wildlife webcams. In 2006, NOAA’s Montrose Settlements Restoration Program, established to make up for a toxic DDT and PCB legacy in southern California, installed a live webcam with a close-up view of the first Bald Eagle nest to hatch a chick naturally on California’s Santa Cruz Island in over 50 years. Thousands watched as the eagle parents tended to their chick, affectionately named “Princess Cruz” by webcam watchers. Today, there are a total of five webcams on other nests around the California Channel Islands, highlighting the success of our Bald Eagle Restoration Program.
We also wanted to connect the public to the underwater world of wetlands with an underwater fish webcam. In 2010, our program installed a live webcam in Huntington Beach wetlands, where we completed one of our fish habitat restoration projects. This underwater camera demonstrates the importance of wetlands as a fish nursery and feeding area.
Watch Bald Eagles Live
A Bald Eagle adult and chicks in the Pelican Harbor nest on Santa Cruz Island. (Photo Credit: Kevin White, Full Frame Productions)
What is cute and cuddly and has wings? You guessed it … a Bald Eagle chick! What is even better is that you can watch these adorable birds on live webcams that are placed near Bald Eagle nests located on Catalina and Santa Cruz Islands in the California Channel Islands right now. Viewers can watch daily as both male and female adults attend to their chicks by feeding them and keeping them warm. One of the most popular nests to watch is the West End nest on Catalina Island that has triplets for the third year in a row.
For eagle enthusiasts, there is a Channel Islands Eaglecam discussion forum where you can post or read daily nest observations, chat with other enthusiasts, or read updates from the Bald Eagle restoration team. With over 1 million hits each year, the Bald Eagle webcams have captivated audiences all over the world from January to June as these regal birds raise their young.
Diving with the Fish
If you are more interested in what lurks beneath the ocean then you should check out the live fish webcam that is broadcast from Talbert Marsh in the Huntington Beach wetlands. Since the fish webcam has been live, we have observed over 20 species of fish, diving seabirds, an octopus, nudibranchs (colorful sea slugs), and numerous other cool invertebrates. We have also seen fish spawning events, territorial displays of fish, and even sharks.
If you want to let us know what you have seen on our webcam, you can fill out our online fish webcam observation sheet. In case our solar-powered camera is down, you can check out this 10 minute clip recorded from the webcam for a snapshot of what you might normally see. The eelgrass swaying side to side is mesmerizing and you can always catch a glimpse of a fish when you log onto the fish webcam. Test your fish identification skills now!
Gabrielle Dorr.
Gabrielle Dorr is the Outreach Coordinator for the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program as part of NOAA’s Restoration Center. She lives and works in Long Beach, California where she is always interacting with the local community through outreach events, public meetings, and fishing education programs.
Examining the Japanese skiff that washed up near Crescent City, Calif., on April 7, 2013. This is the first verified item from the Japan tsunami to appear in California. (Redwood Coast Tsunami Working Group)
The Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco has confirmed to NOAA that a 20-foot-long skiff found near Crescent City, Calif., is the first verified piece of Japan tsunami debris to turn up in California. Crescent City, a coastal town surrounded by redwoods, is only a twenty-mile drive from Oregon down the iconic, coastal Highway 101.
Once the skiff was found, the U.S. Coast Guard and the local sheriff’s office worked quickly to remove it from the shoreline. Help translating the Japanese writing on it came from further down the coast, from staff at California’s Humboldt State University. They traced the skiff to Takata High School, located in Japan’s Iwate Prefecture, an area devastated by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. A teacher from the school reportedly identified the vessel as belonging to them, which the Japanese Consulate has now confirmed.
A close up of the boat’s hull reveals the many small gooseneck barnacles, a common open-ocean species. (Redwood Coast Tsunami Working Group)
To date, 26 other marine debris items with a confirmed connection to the 2011 tsunami have washed up in Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Alaska, and Canada’s British Columbia.
And like so many of them, the small, flat-bottomed boat that washed up in California was thick with gooseneck barnacles, a common and widespread filter feeder that attaches itself to floating objects in the open ocean. While unusual-looking, these barnacles are not invasive and have a fascinating historical myth purporting that a type of goose developed from gooseneck barnacles because they had similar colors and shapes (a typical-if-faulty basis for classifying life in earlier eras).
However, the influx of sea creatures aboard tsunami marine debris also brings the concern that aquatic species hitching a ride to North America may make themselves at home, possibly to the detriment of marine life and commerce communities here in the United States.
A submerged compartment in the back of the Japanese boat that washed up in Long Beach, Wash., provided a refuge for five striped beakfish. (Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife/Allen Pleus)
This issue was highlighted in the unusual case of another small Japanese boat lost in the 2011 tsunami. The Sai-shou-maru came ashore near Long Beach, Wash., on March 22, 2013, but the inside of it looked like a miniature aquarium. Five live fish were swimming about in a submerged compartment at the back of the boat. They were striped beakfish, a species native to coral reefs mainly in Japanese waters, sometimes found in Hawaii, but certainly not in the cold waters of the Pacific Northwest coast.
According to the Washington State Department of Ecology website, “Besides the five striped beakfish found in the open well of the boat when it washed ashore, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates 30 to 50 species of plants and animals were also on the Sai-shou-maru – including potential invasive species. State officials quickly removed the Sai-shou-maru from the beach and collected samples of potential invasive species including the fish, algae, anemones, crabs, marine worms and shellfish.”
However, most of the species arriving on marine debris are not invasive—even if they are hitchhikers.
A 66-foot dock sits on Agate Beach, Oregon. Debris of all different sizes and types from the March 2011 tsunami in Japan has washed ashore in the United States. (Oregon Dept. of Parks and Recreation)
The funds will be used to support marine debris response efforts, such as removal of debris, disposal fees, cleanup supplies, detection and monitoring. NOAA anticipates distributing funds to affected regions as the funds are received from Japan and will work to determine immediate needs and plan for future applications.
Since the disaster, NOAA has been leading efforts with federal, state and local partners to coordinate a response, collect data, assess the debris, and reduce possible impacts to natural resources and coastal communities.
Debris from the disaster has drifted across the Pacific and reached shorelines in the U.S. and Canada. In July, NOAA provided $50,000 each to Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, and California to support response efforts.
Items from the tsunami that have drifted to U.S. shores include sports balls, a floating dock, buoys, and vessels. Mariners and the public can help report debris by emailing DisasterDebris@noaa.gov with information on significant sightings.
By Office of Response and Restoration Scientific Support Coordinator LTJG Alice Drury and National Marine Fisheries Service Senior Scientist Kevin Bailey
Alice Drury: It was lunchtime on September 24, 2012, when I got the call from the U.S. Coast Guard. It involved a sinking boat, some spilled oil, and author John Steinbeck. But I wouldn’t discover this last bit until later.
The F/V Gemini, which turned out to be the F/V Western Flyer chartered by John Steinbeck, after it was raised from the Swinomish Channel in Washington in October 2012. Photo used with permission from Capt. Richard Rodriguez, BitterEndBlog.com/All Rights Reserved.
First, I learned that the F/V Gemini, an old fishing boat moored in Washington’s Puget Sound, had sunk directly underneath the Twin Bridges in Swinomish Channel. On its way down, the vessel was slowly leaking diesel. The leak was slow enough and the oily sheen on the surface of the water was so light that the spilled oil was unrecoverable.
Because the water isn’t very deep in that area, the upper portions of the sunken boat were visible above the water. Responders very quickly surrounded the boat with protective boom to contain the leak.
I worked with the oceanographers and biologists in my office to provide scientific support not only for this situation but also the worst-case, “what-if” scenario—in case something goes wrong and all of the Gemini’s fuel spilled into the surrounding waters.
Fortunately later that afternoon, divers succeeded in pumping the remaining fuel off the Gemini, and the response team was coordinating with the owner to raise the vessel from the channel’s bottom.
But it wasn’t until that evening that I noticed in a report the boat was actually named the F/V Western Flyer, not the F/V Gemini, which was only a modern nickname. This led to very interesting—and unexpected—lesson on the history and literature of this creaky wooden boat sunk in the Swinomish Channel.
That’s when NOAA fisheries scientist and budding ship biographer Kevin Bailey—and John Steinbeck—entered the picture.
Kevin Bailey: The day the Western Flyer sank, I was visiting the Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey, Calif., the boat’s old home in another life. I was there to research a book I am writing about the Flyer and was talking with Tim Thomas, the Sardine Guy, who gives walking tours of the harbor and Cannery Row. I learned about the sinking a few days later when a friend forwarded me a notice linked to NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration IncidentNews website.
The Western Flyer is a porthole to the marine environmental history of the northeast Pacific Ocean. Constructed in Tacoma, Wash., in 1937, this wooden-hulled purse seiner lived several lives—surveying in Alaska, fishing for tuna off La Paz, Mexico, seining for sardines near Monterey, Calif.—before it entered literary history as well.
Travels with Steinbeck
The route around the Gulf of California which John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts took aboard the F/V Western Flyer in 1940. Credit: Wikipedia, Creative Commons.
In 1940, only a few years after publishing Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, writer John Steinbeck, along with his good friend marine biologist Ed Ricketts, chartered the Western Flyer out of Monterey for $2,500. They were preparing for a six week research cruise to the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California.
While the Monterey newspaper characterized the group as “perhaps the strangest crew ever assigned aboard a local work boat,” Steinbeck and company managed to sample the marine life while carousing their way down the coast of Baja California into the Gulf of California and back again.
This voyage was made famous in Steinbeck and Ricketts’ book, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, the republished narrative of a less successful earlier account and which serves as both a travel log of the trip and a look into Ricketts’ influence on Steinbeck. Steinbeck’s experience on the Western Flyer led him to create elements of his later works, including Cannery Row and The Pearl.
Life after the Sea of Cortez
After Steinbeck and Ricketts’ voyage, the Western Flyer would make its way back to the Pacific Northwest, changing hands several times and taking new shape as a fishing trawler. It would haul tens of thousands of pounds of Pacific Ocean perch, a fish known to live up to a hundred years. It would spend the early 1960s surveying more than 20,000 square miles along British Columbia and Alaska in the most extensive fishery survey of that coast up to that time. It would head to Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where it would seek out red king crab, with a cook on board who would later turn out to be the father of a character on Deadliest Catch, a TV series about Alaska king crab fishing.
In 1970, the boat’s owner at the time had a penchant for the NASA space missions, renaming the vessel the Gemini. After changing ownership several times again between 1971 and 2010, the Gemini finally ended up in Washington’s Swinomish Slough under the Twin Bridges on State Route 20, where it’s been sitting since 1997, next to the Swinomish Casino and Lodge.
The cover of John Steinbeck’s “The Log of the Sea of Cortez,” the book written about Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts’ expedition on the F/V Western Flyer in 1940.
The Gemini/Western Flyer’s most recent owner is an Irish immigrant, a real estate developer living in Key West, Fla. He owns several downtown buildings in John Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, Calif. When he bought the boat in 2010, he had a plan to restore the Western Flyer, somehow get the boat down to Salinas, and park it inside one of the buildings as part of the decor of a restaurant and boutique hotel.
A Not-so-final Resting Place
Meanwhile, the boat sat idle for nearly two years—until it sank this past September. The owner told me the boat sank quickly to the bottom because a couple of planks had given way.
I watched a crew refloat the boat at the beginning of October. It seemed hesitant to rise off the bottom where it had rested in the soft mud of the Swinomish Channel for two weeks. But finally the workers succeeded in lifting the vessel, pumping the water out, and putting a temporary patch over the hole.
The owner is sincere about his plan to restore the boat in some fashion, but because of the damage from neglect and sinking, it is going to be an expensive venture, maybe exceeding $600,000. There’s a nonprofit group called the Western Flyer Project that wants to bring the ship back to Monterey for restoration, but they don’t have the resources to do it right now. We’ll have to wait and see what happens to this historic cultural icon, as it continues its rise from the depths.
LTJG Alice Drury.
LTJG Alice Drury graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Environmental Studies in 2008 and shortly thereafter joined the NOAA Corps. After Basic Officer Training Class at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y., LTJG Drury was assigned to NOAA Ship McArthur II for two years. LTJG Drury is now assigned as the Regional Response Officer in OR&R’s Emergency Response Division. In that assignment she acts as assistant to the West Coast, Alaska, and Oceania Scientific Support Coordinators.
Kevin Bailey
Kevin McLean Bailey grew up in the hometown of John Steinbeck, Salinas, Calif. He started his career as a marine fisheries biologist and ecologist in 1974 after graduating from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He later obtained his PhD from the University of Washington. He is a Senior Scientist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. His book on the Alaska pollock fishery, Billion Dollar Fish, is to be published in April 2013 by University of Chicago Press. He is currently writing a book on the Western Flyer and the environmental history of the west coast.
This is a post by Office of National Marine Sanctuaries’ Matt Dozier.
Aerial view of oil rising to the ocean surface (upper left) near the drilling rig, during the Santa Barbara oil spill off the California coast in 1969. (U.S. Geological Survey)
The black ooze crept ashore on the waves, coating beaches and sea life with a sinister sheen. Residents watched, horrified, as relief workers labored to clean scores of oil-covered seabirds. Dead seals and dolphins washed up, poisoned by the toxic sludge.
This was the scene in Santa Barbara following the blowout of Union Oil’s Platform A on Jan. 28, 1969, just six miles from the California coastline. Over a period of 10 days, the damaged well leaked more than 3.2 million gallons of crude oil into the Santa Barbara Channel in one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.
The spill was a catastrophe, but it would also become a catalyst for a new era of conservation. Galvanized by the widespread public outcry against offshore drilling and environmental pollution, Congress passed a flurry of environmental legislation in the years following the spill, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Coastal Zone Management Act.
One of those bills, the Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act, was signed into law 40 years ago on October 23, 1972. It granted the Department of Commerce the authority to create a groundbreaking kind of protected area called a “national marine sanctuary” for the preservation or restoration of American waters with special “conservation, recreational, ecological, or esthetic values.”
Fittingly, one of the first marine sanctuaries would later be designated off Southern California, in waters once threatened by the oil spill that inspired the creation of the Sanctuaries Act. The Channel Islands, clearly visible from seaside towns like Santa Barbara and Ventura that had been tarnished by oil, are sometimes called the “Galapagos of North America” for their unique and fantastically diverse marine life.
Santa Cruz, the largest of the northern Channel Islands. (NOAA Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary)
In the late 1970s, a coalition of local governments and citizens still outraged over the spill banded together to safeguard these jewels of the California coast from further harm. Viewing sanctuary designation as their best shot at permanently protecting the waters around the islands from offshore drilling, the group approached NOAA’s Office of Coastal Zone Management — then in charge of the sanctuary program — to nominate the Channel Islands for sanctuary designation in 1978.
President Jimmy Carter signed off on the designation two years later, making Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary the third addition to the fledgling National Marine Sanctuary System.
Over the last 40 years, the sanctuary system has grown from one sanctuary to 14 sites of all shapes and sizes, including the nearly 140,000-square-mile Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Today, the sanctuaries protect a wide range of diverse resources, from fantastic gardens of coral in the Gulf of Mexico to humpback whale breeding grounds in Hawaii. The sanctuary system even extends to the Great Lakes, where it protects immaculately preserved shipwrecks in Lake Huron.
Throughout their history, national marine sanctuaries have time and again proven to be the best option for preserving special places in our ocean and Great Lakes that are desperately in need of responsible stewardship. With four decades of experience to draw from, NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries will continue to provide lasting protection for our irreplaceable underwater treasures over the next 40 years and beyond.
For the past six years, Matt Dozier has worked as a writer and editor for NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is involved with a wide variety of outreach projects and publications, including the magazine Sanctuary Watch, sanctuary brochures, social media outreach, and OceansLIVE streaming Web broadcasts. Matt holds a master’s degree in science-medical writing from Johns Hopkins University.
While recently leading an activity for middle school students, I showed two pictures of streams. In one, a narrow culvert protruded from under a road, the lower edge a foot or so above the stream that it fed. The other picture showed a wide, shady creek strewn with logs running under a bridge.
“If you were a salmon,” I asked them, “which of these streams would you rather swim up?”
Nearly all hands went up for the stream with the bridge.
As an intern with NOAA’s Restoration Center and Office of General Counsel for Natural Resources, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to help review community grant proposals for fish habitat restoration projects. Having helped write a grant proposal to conduct a wind resource study at my university, I was interested in seeing the other side of a grant program, which meant participating in the review and discussion that determines which projects receive funding.
In 2000, volunteers planted saltmarsh vegetation at Ft. McHenry in Maryland. (NOAA Restoration Center)
Because I have been working at NOAA’s Seattle office, I focused on the grant proposals for Washington state. There were nine proposals from Washington alone this year, and the grant is open nationally, which means only a few excellent projects can be granted funding in each region in a given year. The Restoration Center’s experienced grant reviewers and I first read through the proposals, paying close attention to budget and design details, as well as the likely impact of the projects. After individually scoring each proposal, the reviewers compared notes and discussed each proposal’s strengths and weaknesses, determining which projects would go on to the next round of deliberations for possible funding.
The Restoration Center, partnering with the American Sportfishing Association’s Fish America Foundation, awards grants to projects that will restore habitat for sport fish species such as salmon and trout. These projects can include removing barriers that prevent fish from migrating upstream to spawn, such as dams and culverts; placing large woody debris in streams to provide fish with places to rest and hide; or planting native vegetation near streams to provide shade.
For example, the Mattole Restoration Council, a community organization in Petrolia, Calif., was awarded a $57,800 Fish America Foundation grant a few years ago to remove a culvert along a tributary of the Mattole River and replace it with a bridge. This project restored one mile of prime steelhead and salmon habitat.
The Applied Environmental Sciences Site prior to restoration. Fill material and common reed (Phragmites australis) were removed in 2003 during the shoreline and saltmarsh restoration of Bar Beach Lagoon in New York. (EEA/Laura Schwanof)
Since the partnership began 14 years ago, the Fish America Foundation and NOAA have awarded $6.9 million in grants, resulting in an estimated $23 million worth of restored fish habitat along U.S. coasts, including the Great Lakes. Volunteers play an integral role in these projects, contributing 11,000 hours of labor to the projects funded in 2010 alone.
These funding opportunities are part of the Restoration Center’s Community-Based Restoration Program, which focuses on facilitating and funding hands-on community involvement in habitat restoration. This project is also part of a broader effort throughout many of NOAA’s offices to involve the public in restoring and protecting the natural resources in their communities.
NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, which works closely with the Restoration Center to evaluate and restore environmental damages after oil and chemical releases, also reaches out to conservation groups and community members to help rehabilitate degraded habitat. In these cases, the people responsible for the spill are required to fund the restoration projects.
The background shows 2003 saltmarsh restoration at the Applied Environmental Sciences site in New York. In the foreground you can see further restoration which North Hempstead, N.Y., continued in 2007. (NOAA/Lisa Rosman)
Through participation in these community restoration projects, people learn the importance of high-quality habitat, gain the knowledge and experience to pick out other potential projects in their communities, and help make restoration more effective and longer lasting. To learn more about restoration projects in your community, take a look at NOAA’s Restoration Atlas.
Sarah Idczak recently completed a summer internship working jointly with NOAA’s Office of General Counsel Natural Resources Section and NOAA’s Restoration Center. She is a senior at Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University, studying environmental policy.
An aerial view of debris from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck northern Japan, taken on March 13, 2011, only days after the disaster struck. Debris fields such as these are no longer visible. (U.S. Navy)
As the devastating tsunami waves which hit Japan in March 2011 receded from land, they washed approximately 5 million tons of debris into the ocean. While Japan estimates about 30 percent of that originally floated away from shore, there are no accurate estimates of how much debris is still floating today.
Concerns persist that this diverse array of floating materials—everything from boats and building rubble to appliances and consumer products—could wash up on shores in Hawaii, Alaska, the U.S. West Coast, and Canada over the next few years.
A recently updated model from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted that some very buoyant debris already may have reached the Pacific Northwest coast as early as winter 2011–2012.
NOAA researchers were validating these results with other modeling experts when a Japanese fishing vessel was reported adrift in Canadian waters near British Columbia, and its connection to the tsunami was confirmed. The model shows that the bulk of the tsunami debris, however, likely remains dispersed in the Pacific Ocean north of the main Hawaiian Islands and east of Midway Atoll.
NOAA continues to lead efforts with international, federal, state, and local partners to collect data on marine debris quantity, location, and movement; to assess its possible impacts; and to make plans to reduce tsunami debris impacts to our coastal communities and natural resources.
Predicting Where the Debris May Travel
Immediately after the March 2011 disaster, NOAA used a computer model employing past data on ocean currents to forecast potential paths of the tsunami debris. It provided NOAA with an idea of the general direction and timing of the debris, with the recognition that over time changing ocean conditions might affect the expected behavior of the drifting materials.
More than a year later, NOAA modelers have been able to incorporate wind speed and ocean current data from the past year into an updated model. This new modeling effort gives us a better understanding of where the debris may have traveled to-date, but it does not predict where it will go in the future or how fast it will drift. The new model takes into account that wind may move items at different speeds based on how high or low materials sit in the water.
UPDATE: The below model graphic is current with data as of April 3, 2013.
NOAA model of past and current predictions of the location and concentrations of Japan tsunami marine debris. Data current as of April 3, 2013. (NOAA) Click to enlarge.
Monitoring Debris at Sea and on Shore
NOAA is collecting observations from aircraft, vessels, and high-resolution satellites in an attempt to track where the debris may go as it crosses the ocean. We are working with partners that regularly travel the Pacific Ocean, including the U.S. Coast Guard, commercial shipping vessels, and the fishing industry to keep watch for debris. Ships may report sightings to DisasterDebris@noaa.gov.
Currently, NOAA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and state and local partners are surveying the background levels of marine debris stranded on U.S. coastlines in order to better detect potential influxes of tsunami debris on land. The public may also participate in shoreline monitoring by requesting our standardized protocols through the NOAA Marine Debris Program at MD.monitoring@noaa.gov.
For the past several months, the NOAA Marine Debris Program and federal, state, and local partners have been preparing contingency plans that will help protect our coastal communities, since the debris may be a hazard to natural resources, such as U.S. beaches, wildlife, marine sanctuaries, and navigation. These plans will guide local responses in case large, hazardous, or unmanageable items need to be removed from U.S. shores.
State radiation experts have assured NOAA that it is highly unlikely any debris will be contaminated. Some marine debris collected along shorelines has been randomly spot-checked in Hawaii and on the West Coast, and to date, no one has detected radiation levels of concern.
Keeping Up with the Latest Information
The NOAA Marine Debris Program continues to provide updates to communities and partners in Hawaii, Alaska, and on the West Coast through a number of public meetings and other outreach activities.
To stay up-to-date on the latest information on the debris as well as NOAA monitoring and modeling efforts, visit the NOAA Marine Debris Program [leaves this blog] website. Our state partners are also sharing regional information at
http://disasterdebris.wordpress.com [leaves this blog].
Closed beach sign at Crissy Field, San Francisco Bay, after the 2007 Cosco Busan oil spill. Credit: Mila Zinkova, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0.
How do we deal with big spills along America’s coasts? In the latest podcast from NOAA’s National Ocean Service, scientist Greg Baker helps explain the flip side of cleaning up oil spills: Figuring out the environmental costs—and what it would take to fix them.
Listen to the podcast here, and read some highlights from the discussion below:
“When a spill happens, there’s a cleanup aspect to it, and then there’s this other aspect of damages. And shouldn’t the responsible party have to do more than just clean it up? Shouldn’t they have to fix the losses that occurred as a result of the spill? And that’s the role of the natural resource trustees — simply to advocate for the fish and the birds and the things that, on their own, really can’t file a claim against the company that caused the problem.”
–Greg Baker, Office of Response and Restoration
Who are these “natural resource trustees” who are speaking up for nature?
They’re the people whose everyday jobs are dedicated to taking care of public natural resources like the fish and the birds and the beaches. They work for the states and tribes affected by the spill as well as federal agencies like NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of the Interior. When a big oil spill happens, they band together in a group known as “trustees” to act on behalf of the environment.
“And then we [the trustees] plan out what kind of data collection we need to conduct immediately. So what are the potential impacts given the size, the location, the season of the spill, what kinds of resources — fish, birds, wildlife — are we expecting are going to be impacted and, therefore, where should we plan to go out in the field and collect that information.”
–Greg Baker
Once they’re ready, they take a first look at the environmental damages, which can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months depending on the spill size. If things look bad enough, the trustees move ahead to the next phase: a long-term, full-blown damage assessment. Greg said that longer-term assessments are often needed because areas sometimes have to be studied over seasons and even over years to really understand what’s going on in the ecosystem.
That was the case with the Cosco Busan oil spill, which took two years to study. The spill occurred when the cargo ship Cosco Busan crashed into the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in November 2007, causing one of the largest oil spills in the history of San Francisco Bay.
NOAA scientists helped study the spill’s impacts on herring, which migrate into the Bay each winter to spawn. In places affected by the spill, their eggs turned up dead or deformed. Because of this, we studied another two seasons of herring spawning to uncover any lasting effects the oil might have had on these fish.
The point of all these studies is to calculate a dollar amount for what it will take to restore all the damages to fish, plants, and wildlife, to habitats, to shorelines, and to human recreation loss. For the Cosco Busan, the legal settlement came out to $44.4 million dollars [leaves this blog], the biggest settlement to date since the Oil Protection Act came into force.
