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Science

Black Water 32

Posted by michael from the no-swimming dept.
Romancer writes "The Naples Daily News has an article about an environmental anomaly discovered by local fisherman: "They've dubbed it black water, and they're demanding that local, state and national government agencies find out what's causing it." With the Ice shelf falling and now this, solutions are helping but might be a bit late."
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Black Water More

Black Water

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  • Why can't a comet or astroid just hit the earth already. I'm sick of hearing about global warming or how "we" are screwing up everything.
  • Does this remind anyone of the old cartoon `Pirates of Dark Water'? Or is it just me..

  • Great. Now I've got that Doobie Brothers' song [simplenet.com] stuck in my head. ;)

  • It's the ghost of Frank Zappa [attbi.com]!

  • 'Black Water' (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cy Guy ( 56083 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @10:13AM (#3200097) Homepage Journal
    FYI, this is a common plumbing term for raw sewage.

    My vote for responsible parties would have to include the FL sugar industry. They have been one the worst polluters in US history, and wouldn't even be there if the US government didn't impose the harshest import restrictions & tariffs for any agricultural product on foreign sugar.

    Because of the sugar subsidies, the industry polutes, practices penury (the labor practice of keeping workers permanently in debt, so that they effectively have to live/work as slaves), and export other food industry jobs which pay good union wages out of the country where companies can buy sugar at world prices.

  • Cthulhu (Score:2, Insightful)

    by shpoffo ( 114124 )
    Blackness crawling up from ocean deeps. Strange plagues that get dredged up from the ocean. Nothing goes away, even if we forget it. We may laugh a good joke of cthonic horros, but all folklore has it's basis in some piece of the world.

    "That which is dead may eternal lie, and in strange aeons even death may die"

    -shpoffo
  • This article is really nuts.

    Half of it sounds like insane, pirate legend.

    "This (dark) stuff goes all the way to the bottom," Richardson said

    Maybe it has something to do with flesh eating disease? What? Global warming? Overfishing? Sewage? Mothra is awaking? Red tide? Which?

    I wouldn't even bother to read this article until someone has gone out there and found out what's happening.

    .

    • Re:Crazy (Score:2, Insightful)

      by t ( 8386 )
      I especially like how they've never tested a water sample nor the bacteria causing the infections. Just throw antibiotics at. Typical of modern HMO's.

      t.

  • We've seen this before, haven't we ?

    The thing with bomber from WWII aliens, and that black stuff on peoples eyes...

    Quote:
    Although there are almost no fish in the zone, Daniels said, the few that fishermen found there -- and other fish that entered the water -- reacted strangely.

    "You'd see them here and there, but they were jumping and running, not stopping -- and acting different," Daniels said. "Like they didn't want to be there."

    Scary...

    Unfortunately, this is not an X-Files episode but "reality-tv".
  • Personally I find it hard to sympathize with *any* commercial fishermen, they resent responsible harvesting practices, they are ambivalent towards corporate pollution which second to their own over fishing is mostly responsible to the decline of fisheries. When they can no longer make money they apparently are incapable of changing careers, insisting their occupation is some sort of romantic historical thing.If they really were interested in the long term vitality of their industry, they'd take a lot more interest in the big picture and stop being so myopic and short sighted.

  • Ah people.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by billcopc ( 196330 )
    Black water is what happens when black ice finally melts. Duh!
  • Maybe the aliens from "The Abyss" are coming up cuz there pissed off. Hell in the last 12 years they've added to there video archive of fucked up things going on on this planet.

  • Fix it (Score:3, Funny)

    by Shotgun ( 30919 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @01:47PM (#3201882)
    If the thing is caused by warm water, what's to stop a bunch of these soon to be out of work fishermen from banning together, taking a trek down south, and hauling that huge as iceburg and dropping it in the Gulf right in the middle of the black water?

    Yeah, it would be somewhat expensive, but it beats getting your feet ate be microorganisms.

  • Terrifying (Score:2, Insightful)

    by cassandy ( 557648 )
    I used to live in Newfoundland, where the fishing industry is a major source of the economy. Fishing like that is a lifestyle, handed down from generation to generation. You can't just say 'Oh, something happened, there are no fish, go find a real job'. Besides that, the cause here isn't overfishing, it's something else (or there would have been a gradual decrease in the fish stocks, etc.)

    In St. John's harbour is something called 'The Bubble'. It's this small area of pitch black murky water, on which seagulls can land, where all of the unfiltered sewage from St. John's is poured into the ocean. If you fall into the harbour around that area, you could easily die from all of the disease that lives in that square metre. But this is something isolated, as opposed to the large patches of black water, which suggests that some one has been continually dumping something very toxic into the ocean at certain points.

    Fishermen are generally the most knowledgable about the ocean. If they didn't see the black water coming, then something drastic and serious just happened, and that's a cause for huge concern. When an entire fish stock dissipears all at once, that's a cause for an immediate investigation, and notification of the Dept of Public Health. Something serious is obviously going on down there, that (rightfully) scares the crap out of any one with any knowledge about fishing or marine life.

  • What fools these mortals be. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dancing Tree ( 536870 ) on Thursday March 21, 2002 @06:08PM (#3204007) Homepage
    Great. So we hear that fishermen are reporting an insurgence of flesh eating bacteria and none of the "smart" doctors who have treated it have had the intelligence or forsight to actually culture a sample of the organism. They just take a guess at what they think it might be and administer a stiff antibacterial. What f***ing morons.

    Then we hear that there is a dead zone of some 400 square miles where the water is sort of black all the way to the bottom and nothing is living in it. The few fish that wander into the "black water" go crazy to get out it. And no scientists have been dispatched to take water samples and find out what the hell is going on. Are they also stupid or are they under orders to not find out what is the cause? Or perhaps working on a "five dollar a day" budget has crippled them and their ability to do anything.

    Oh no, nothing wrong here. Just some old wives tales and pirate yarns. It must be that those fisherman are just drinking too much slcohol. Of course, everyone knows that if you get drunk alot and then go hang out on boats for long periods of time, you automically contract a case of flesh eating bacteria. Ask any yachter or sailing man. Everything is just great in the president's brother's state.

    I tell ya, if I had any say in it, there be a team of marine biologist and chemists descending on the Gulf of Mexico like a swarm of locusts. This is nuts. And to hear that there is also a huge dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River is really insane. A river mouth traditionally was a place that would be teaming with life due to nutrients and food being washed down to the sea but here in the good old McUSA it's just business as usual.

    Yes, how much longer until one of those near misses registers a direct hit. I'm hoping the cosmic debris might raise IQs everywhere while killing off major quantities of stupid people and politicians.

    When the ice melted, the seas rose. - Morgan Llewellyn, The Elementals

  • I recall, when I was younger, there were a few cases of some flesh-eating disease in Michigan. And if I recall correctly, even though we live several hours from where it happened, everyone made quite a huge deal.

    Now, there is obviously an enviromental problem that may be connected to diseases, and very little is being done. VERY little. If you recall, when that antrax-in-the-mail fiasco went on, they tested the strains and all that stuff, if I remember right. Granted, this flesh-eating-disease thing doesn't seem to be a danger to the public, but it's still a dangerous disease. Health departments around here, in Michigan, go into a frenzy whenever there's an outbreak of any sort of fatal disease, especially of the bacterial persuasion. Look at the way Michigan communities react when there are cases of meningitis in the area.

    The lack of attention and concern paid to this whole ordeal in the gulf and to the fishermen who contracted this flesh-eating disease leads me to a conclusion: Someone with some power knows exactly what's going on and is trying to cover it up.

    That's all I can really assume. BUt it would make sense, no?

  • According to an old salt... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zarf ( 5735 ) on Friday March 22, 2002 @01:54AM (#3205986) Journal
    I asked my coworker here that used to do Marine studies in Biscayne and Florida Bay, his answer was so thoroughly educational and authoritative sounding I thought I'd post it here:

    Zarf:
    > You guys ever hear of this stuff?

    I've seen it.

    As you are well aware, every drop of seawater is loaded with micro-organisms. Try to cheat and jump start your aquarium by getting a few buckets of seawater straight from the source, but screw it up and don't aerate it or give it enough light. Leave it in the car trunk too long. Or just leave seawater standing in the bowl in your sailboat's head. The water dies. It doesn't even have the good manners to stay clear. It turns black and anaerobic, and fits the description in the Naples' article. An absentee captain who kept his motorboat in the slip next to me used to complain that someone was breaking onto his boat and using his head without flushing it when he wasn't around. He just left water sitting in it for weeks on end. Same stuff.

    BTW, "blackwater" means sewage to us sailors. Even the phrase "deadwater" is already used. ("Deadwater" is where there is a sharp boundary very near the surface between fresh melted glacier water and seawater. This boundary supports internal waves. Displacement boats at the surface create a second wake at the boundary which slows them to a crawl, hence the name. This is usually found in fjords.... but I digress.)

    I've got two ideas about where this stuff came from. The first is that something was released into the water that killed everything. Some sort of toxic dumping. I'm sure that's what some people are thinking. But I think that's overstating what happened.

    More likely, the cause wasn't so deliberately evil. My guess is that someone ballasted a very large ship with a lot of seawater. The water sat in her tanks for a long time, and died just as though it were sitting in my sailboat's head too long. Then, as they approached port, they realized they'd forgotten to dump it overboard offshore. So they dumped on the coastal shelf on the way in. The fish know something is wrong, which is why they're avoiding it and acting funny. But it's nothing as actively toxic as a red tide bloom. Just ballast water.

    It's important to realize that the waters there are relatively still. I should know, this was the very stuff I studied at RSMAS. The Straits of Florida act as a bandpass filter and so only a weak diurnal tide is left (the strong lunar driven semi-diurnal tides are restricted to the East coast of the state). If the Loop Current is even in the area right now (it meanders wildly and unpredictably) it probably isn't riding up onto the shelf where this ballastwater is or it would have swept this stuff away. I haven't looked at Florida weather lately, but maybe they haven't had a good strong cold front for a while either. Wind driven circulation is important; cold fronts are the biggest feature around Florida during this season. Heck, maybe it would have stayed together through weather events like that. Given those conditions and assuming the salinity of the ballast water is close to the surrounding water, diffusion will be painfully slow and patches will remain identifiable for a long time. (I used to use freshwater releases from the mainland as a tracer; I'd zip around in a speedboat and map the salinity across Biscayne and Florida Bay from one week to the next. You could follow the blobs of water even though their integrity was being attacked by density driven circulation from its low salinity.) What is left is a weak flow, a combination of wind and tidally driven pumping, that slowly brings water from that area into Florida Bay and then pumps it south through passes between the Keys into Hawk Channel. On the other side, the boundary between chalky/murky green runoff from Florida Bay and the cleaner Florida Straits water is so clear it can be seen from a boat as a sharp line. Perhaps the residents in the Keys will get a close view of it as it passes by?

    Slainte'
    John

    John doesn't read slashdot anyhow so this information might never have made a post here. But, I do find his explination remarkable in that it gives a relatively simple cause that seems very plausable. I like answers like that so I could be a little biased especially since it takes a lot of steam out of the hype surrounding the story.

    I know this won't get modded up now but perhaps a few people will read this and be enlightened.
    • Ok, ballast water. Did you actually read the article? it says
      the mass of black-colored water reached from 20 miles north of Marathon Key halfway to Naples. It stretched west almost 20 miles into the Gulf of Mexico

      a quick guess looking at a map its about 90 miles from marathon to naples, puting the black water in a 35 mile stretch between marathon and naples, and 20 miles west. Just from this the water covers an area of 700 square miles. Also in the article it says that the black water is not just on the surface, but goes all the way to the bottom. But even if it dosent, lets say it only goes 15 feet deep, thats still about 2 cubic miles of water. I doubt even all the boats in southern florida have that much room in their hull.
  • I'd imagine it's a moving bit of water from the 1993 Mississippi flood (definitely causes it) and fertilizer(maybe causes it)-induced permanent dead zone in the gulf.

    Here's a descriptive link [fishingnj.org].

  • why not get nasa envolved. Use it for early terraforming in ocean geting the area living again by getting a mix of organic lifeforms and stuff you know... also putting more restrictions on watershed etc.. might help also the department of agriculture might do some tests or something on waste water.. also better sewage systems that take sewage out of natural filtration yah tons of dollars tons of jobs maybe even have the us analysis department take care of logistics for the public works of municipalities for the projects also more regulations on watercode for boats and more rules regarding waste dumping... no one cares though. The us wouldn't even stick to kyoto because they would probably loose a $ or two when in effect the technolgies research would end up making a better managed goverment and raise education(no statistics sorry) generally make a better world. It's not like solving enviromental problems is difficult its just that people don't care until its the water theyre drinking americans are self centered and ignorant just like me and most of the rest of the world it would be nice if a seagul with a simple desiese had media publicity but instead we like playing on the same issues that 99% of people already are fully aware of and we wouldn't want to miss the gossip on the grammy's no that would make our lives so much more less fun. People are ignorant of world issues because we are taught to be because we have to maintain.. I hope it is sooner than later that the mass of society relizes our planet is dying and that if we don't kill ourselves our planets gravitation and magnetic centers are going to mess us to who knows but we are all so inclined to selfish survival needs growing into unknown power wholes. I might have maybe said some stuff that is a little exagerated or something. What I'm trying to say is that the issues can be dealt with but we(your society) is more concerned with personal greed and maitnence then it is with building a society that can progress and stregthen while not excluding. The capitalist system is one which only build an elitist society and will destroy itself. Nationallity and national boudries are just one of the barriers that we so ignorantly accept. Ownership on a personal level rather than a social level is what is and will destroy us. A strong society would deal with issues as they occur and network to solve them. The US goverment is overweighted and latent. I think I got off topic. Anyway. They should deal with posible causes aswell as future problems they also need to rehabilitate the area. The US will do ish. The great social organism of nothing with the power of so much. Selfish intrest Selfish pursuits.
  • Pictures [nasa.gov] of the stuff.

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