I'll get to my environmental topic in a moment, plus a little extra BP angry-candy.
But first, it's been hot. Crazy hot.
To give you an idea of how crazy hot, last frost isn't until June 4th here. And yet it's been getting close to the 90s. We've had an early summer here this year, and people are doing the Summer thing early, dressing down to their swimmies and heading down to the water's edge to get some cool, free relief from the heat...and maybe to watch other people who have dressed down to their swimmies.
Today I went down to the Big Lake on another beautiful day and found a thin, green film floating atop the water.
Algae. Growing in the heat.
Large algal blooms that cause dead zones, or oxygen depleted areas incapable of supporting life, are also increasing. The central basin of Lake Erie, for example, is once again a dead zone. Area residents experienced a similar situation in the early 1970s. and they instituted a series of measures to deal with the problem such as removing phosphates from laundry detergents and reducing phosphorus discharges from wastewater treatment facilities.
Article
It's a problem.
A huge problem.
And of course...of COURSE we only have ourselves to blame. Of course, right?
So...let's talk phosphorous.
Algae loves phosphorous. Makes it start acting all crazy and start blooming. Phosphorous is a common runoff from lawn and farm fertilizers that find their way into the lakes from streams and groundwater -- observe my mandatory plug for organic gardening, by the way.
Over the years, though, we've been doing better about our phosphorous, and the Great Lakes saw an actual decline in the absolute amount of phosphorous in the water.
HURRAY US!
But....
...we kinda sorta accidentally dumped ballast water from incoming ships from halfway around the world and it introduced the zebra and quagga mussels. There's about, and I'm not kidding here, several trillion invasive mussels in the Great Lakes...
Now..the thing about these mussels is, they filter the ever livin' fuck out of the water.
The damn water in the Great Lakes is crystal clear now. It's gorgeous. And it's not supposed to be like that. But it is. Because the mussels filter the water...
That's bad because
A) They eat everything that other base food chain things would have eaten and
B) All the nasty chemicles in the lake get filtered out and concentrated into the bodies of the mollusks...who just happen to live close to shore....and so...
and so...that means that even though we technically have LESS phosphorous than we used to overall, almost ALL of it is concentrated along the shoreline in the bodies of living and dead zebra and quagga mussels...like a band of algae fertilizer right near the lakes edge..that's one of the hypotheses anyway.
And now that the water is extremely clear, more sunlight can penetrate deeper into the water for even MORE algae.
And once again worse......zebra and quagga mussels can selectively filter out the toxic blue-green algae and not eat them, meaning the algae blooms are often of a toxic blue-green algae variety that's toxic to birds, fish, and small mammals.
Now that that primer is done, I remember I promised some extracurricular Hating On BP time and here goes
"
While British Petroleum (BP) is in the news for the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — quickly becoming the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history — environmental groups and lawmakers are arguing that the company’s environmental practices pose a similar threat to the Great Lakes.
BP’s Whiting oil refinery, on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan in Indiana, is the nation’s fourth largest refinery and is in the process of a $3.8 billion dollar expansion project aimed at boosting its capacity to process oil from the Canadian tar sands.
[snip]
Ehlers called the planned discharges by BP "totally inconsistent with the goals of Great Lakes restoration" and warned that ammonia and suspended solids promote algae blooms that can suffocate fish, destroy fish habitat, deprive plants of sun and oxygen and trigger beach closings.
-- Article
At some point maybe we'll figure out that our ecosystems are a lot more fragile than we reckon them to be...that everything we dump into the ground eventually comes back to bite us in the ass.