Thursday 15 November 2007

Crimea oil spill kills 30,000 birds


More than 30,000 birds have died in the wake of the spill of thousands of tonnes of oil from the tanker that broke apart near the Black Sea at the weekend, says the governor of the disaster-hit region. Countless birds, weighed down by thick coatings of oil, are hopping weakly along the shore or sitting helplessly in the sand.
Read the rest here It is less widely known that the Black Sea - one of the world's largest inland marine environments - has suffered far more heavily over recent decades without any such attention being paid to it. Though traditionally rich in fish and other species, the Black Sea, like other marine environments around the world, has faced a daily combination of over-exploitation of resources, chronic pollution and threats from coastal development, so much so that it was declared "nearly dead", and labelled as "the toilet bowl for half of Europe" in the early 1990s.
Damming the Danube, coupled with massive levels of run-off of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilisers being pumped into the Black Sea, have led to proliferation of toxic algal blooms and unprecedented deterioration of the marine ecosystem. Read the rest here

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