Another day, another oil rig explosion in the Gulf. Ho-hum. That, of course, is an exaggerated way of looking at today’s fire on an oil production platform, the Vermillion 380, located eighty miles off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. All thirteen workers were able to get off the rig in life jackets and float for two hours – linked arm-in-arm – before being rescued. It doesn’t sound like oil is leaking into the ocean but for the moment most of the “information” is coming from the rig’s management, Mariner Energy. A cynic could equate the spate of recent oil industry explosions, fires, leaks and sinkings around the world – whether in China, Michigan or the Gulf – as ...

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A few months from now, at the height of Antarctica’s very short summer, riders aboard one “bad-ass” snowmobile will attempt to cross the seventh continent. A so-called “Bio-Inspired Ice Vehicle” designed by Lotus will pace a team of eleven researchers hoping to make the fastest “crossing” of Antarctica. As is required of all expeditions these days, whether they mean it or not, there is an environmental message attached. The Moon-Regan Transantarctic Expedition says it wants to “examine the impact of climate change on the continent and raise awareness of the issue.” (I’m not 100 percent convinced that driving across Antarctica is ...

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The worst thing about the dead zones now growing annually at the mouths of more than 400 rivers around the world is that the causes aren’t local, but originate in farm fields and urban areas sometimes more than a thousand miles away. Take the very first identified dead zone, for example, at the mouth of the Mississippi River where it dumps into the Gulf of Mexico. Each year during the summer months it stretches from Mississippi to Texas covering an area the size of New Jersey and killing everything – fish and plant alike – in its path. But the roots ...

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Recent reports about a spike in ocean temperatures off Sumatra and subsequent coral reef die-off takes me back to a pair of recent visits to the Maldives, where a similar mysterious warming killed off its reefs a dozen years ago. A just-released report by the Wildlife Conservation Society suggests as much as 60-80 percent of the reefs across the Andaman Sea from Sumatra to Thailand and Myanmar have been bleached by temperatures risen to as high as 93 degrees F, about nine degrees warmer than average. The WCS labeled it one of the “most rapid and severe coral mortality ...

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A lead NOAA scientist responsible for the agency’s report suggesting that “74 percent of the oil” spewed by the BP gusher had already disappeared is now suggesting the numbers in the government-released document were drawn from incomplete science. Few in Washington and certainly no one in the Gulf believed the account when it was first leaked to the New York Times on August 5, for simple reasons: There’s still lots of oil visible on beaches, in marshes, on the surface and below. And there are increasing numbers of scientific studies that immediately call into question NOAA’s clearly optimistic numbers. Last week ...

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With the upcoming five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (August 29), the Gulf Coast is bracing for another media onslaught. Network anchors all have their tickets (each competing for turf with Anderson Cooper along New Orleans’s Riverwalk), CNN is broadcasting a two-part special (“New Orleans Rising”) and next Monday/Tuesday HBO will air Spike Lee’s four-hour documentary, “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise.” As if the place hadn’t gotten enough attention during the past four-plus months, the Gulf States can’t stay out of the news these days, which is a good thing. Given the continuing debate over just how much ...

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