Water & Oceans

"TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Federal officials are declaring a fishery disaster for Florida's oyster industry in the Gulf of Mexico.

The collapse of the oyster industry last year followed a drought that reduced freshwater into Apalachicola Bay. But state officials have also blamed the lack of freshwater flow due to increased consumption in Georgia.

"Lake Okeechobee keeps rising — and so do worries about an aging dike the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ranks among the most vulnerable to failure in the country."

"Federal scientists investigating an unusually high number of dead bottlenose dolphins washing up on the East Coast said on Thursday the carcasses are showing up at a rate that is seven times higher than usual."

"MELBOURNE, Fla. — The first hint that something was amiss here, in the shallow lagoons and brackish streams that buffer inland Florida from the Atlantic’s salt water, came last summer in the Banana River, just south of Kennedy Space Center. Three manatees — the languid, plant-munching, over-upholstered mammals known as sea cows — died suddenly and inexplicably, one after another, in a spot where deaths were rare."

"The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to let oil companies continue to dump polluted wastewater on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. This includes chemicals that companies add to the wells during hydraulic fracturing, an engineering practice that makes wells produce more oil."

"The 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill focused attention on the hazards of drilling for oil a mile below the surface of the sea, but recent incidents have brought new attention to dangers that still lurk on the shallow continental shelf, where companies rely on decades-old pipes and platforms to tap aging fields."

"Britain's biggest ever 'fatberg' has been removed from a London sewer. Thames Water say a 'bus-sized lump' of food fat mixed with wet wipes formed in drains under London Road in Kingston upon Thames."

"As an extended drought bakes the West, nowhere are ravages of changes in the climate worse than in New Mexico."

"Dozens of dead or sick Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have washed ashore along beaches from Virginia north to New York, including several baby dolphins in Delaware, since early June."