Louisiana, sinking fast, prepares to empty out its coastal plain

WASHINGTON (BLOOMBERG) - Louisiana is finalising a plan to move thousands of people from areas threatened by the rising Gulf of Mexico, effectively declaring uninhabitable a coastal area larger than Delaware.

Flood waters from Tropical Storm Harvey cover a road in Iowa,
 Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, on Aug 29, 2017

A draft of the plan, the most aggressive response to climate-linked flooding in the US, calls for prohibitions on building new homes in high-risk areas, buyouts of homeowners who live there now and hikes in taxes on those who won't leave. 

Commercial development would still be allowed, but developers would need to put up bonds to pay for those buildings' eventual demolition.

Read The Straits Times story - “Louisiana, sinking fast, prepares to empty out its coastal plain.”

Warming waters slow our oceans' 'perfect athletes'

Shark attacks become more common as warming
waters force predators nearer the surface.

Marlin and sailfish are the oceans’ perfect athletes. A marlin can outweigh a polar bear, leap through the air, and traverse the sea from Delaware to Madagascar. Sailfish can outrace nearly every fish in the sea. Marlin can hunt in waters a half mile down, and sailfish often head to deep waters too.

Yet in more and more places around the world, these predators are sticking near the surface, rarely using their formidable power to plunge into the depths to chase prey.

The discovery of this behavioral quirk in fish built for diving offers some of the most tangible evidence of a disturbing trend: Warming temperatures are sucking oxygen out of waters even far out at sea, making enormous stretches of deep ocean hostile to marine life.

“Two hundred meters down, there is a freight train of low-oxygen water barreling toward the surface,” says William Gilly, a marine biologist with Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California. Yet, “with all the ballyhoo about ocean issues, this one hasn’t gotten much attention.”

Read the National Geographic story - “Oceans Are Losing Oxygen—and Becoming More Hostile to Life.”