#Heat is an industrial water pollutant. Electric generating plants, nuclear power plants and many other manufacturing operations require enormous amount of water for cooling. Water needed for factory operations is drawn from lakes or rivers. Afterwards, the hot water is discharged back into the same lake or river, and if this water is hot enough to raise average temperatures in a large volume of the stream or lake, this can radically upset the ecosystem. Plants and animals adapted to a certain temperature are affected and may be unable to survive when the temperature rises a degree or two above the upper limit of that range. In most cases, as in gas flaring, temperatures are raised so high that fish and other aquatic mammals migrate to calmer and cooler waters. The result is a drastic reduction of population of these animals in that region, and subsequently the economics of that region is also brutally affected in terms of fishing and fish trading. For instance, the rivers in the rural regions off the coast of the Niger Delta in Nigeria are rapidly loosing great populations of fish and other marine edibles, and the indigenes of these regions are loosing their livelihood of fishing and fish trading. This has been due to the fact that the abundant supplies of fish have migrated from such regions as a result of acute thermal pollution of surface waters.
If one or two species disappear, the ecosystem may not have sufficient diversity to compensate for the loss and it may break down completely in due time. The story of the pollution of wider oceans cannot be contained as in the study of rivers, streams and lakes. However, one can deduce that the effects are nonetheless the same, only this time, on a much larger scale.
The pollution problem that affects rivers and lakes also affect estuaries and coastal zones where the continent meets the ocean.
Large scale disturbances of marine ecosystems could produce complex and far reaching effects, and it is critically important for today’s 21st century man to learn much more about the physical and biological processes of the oceans. Although, over the past decades, various research projects and expeditions have been carried out to this effect.
Oil spills are a good case at this point. As mentioned earlier in the previous posts, crude oil has spilled into the ocean from wrecked tankers or offshore oil wells several times in the past. And some of these oil spills have provoked a great deal of public attention, thus, leading to the awareness of the ills of global oil pollution. A good example is the Santa Barbara, California oil spill in 1969 which generated a lot of controversy and arguments, and it thus became the general concern of many over what damages resulted from the blow out of a well in the Santa Barbara Channel. The aesthetic damage was very obvious and it was clear that some birds and other creatures were killed. An estimated 3500 sea birds and other marine animals such as dolphins, elephant seals and sea lions were destroyed. These were the long term ecological consequences that resulted from this demise. Also increased anxiety, depression and domestic disputes were the psychological disorders reported to have affected clean up workers and their spouses.
Oil still remains the main pollutant on the Mediterranean, which is gradually on its way to becoming a Dead Sea. In recent past, the Mediterranean which was selected as the prototype of a polluted sea by scientists and diplomats from 30 countries came to an agreement that there was a need for multilateral pollution control legislation to save the Mediterranean. The consensus was that oil was the most serious pollutant, and that legislation procedures should be formulated and embarked upon to control tankers, refineries, terminal pipelines, and the discharge of tank washings from oil carriers.
This has not however been the case in Africa, especially the Niger Delta regions were oil drilling and spills have rendered some whole communities defunct and useless, as their environment and livelihoods have been brutally lost to oil pollution..
Comments
Post a Comment