Black Water

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."

Comments

'Black Water'

[Cy Guy]

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.

Fix it

[Shotgun]

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.

What fools these mortals be.

[Dancing Tree]

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

According to an old salt...

[Zarf]

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.