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Caffeine Level In Sea Causes Concern
DarkHand writes "Researchers at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU) have spent three years looking for trace remains of pharmaceuticals in drainage water and the sea near Tromsoe in northern Norway. The project has focused on 16 substances and a high concentration of caffeine was one of the surprising finds. Need a lift in the morning? Have a refreshing glass of seawater!"
Not to me. I've been drinking a lot of coffee and pissing in the fjords.
I have been pwned because my
Contrary to popular myth, most sharks one comes across in the ocean are docile creatures who just want to be left alone and will occasionally stop resting in order to find something to eat - fish, generally, or surfers if they decide the surfers look a little too much like seals. (No, I'm not making this up.) I "swim with" sharks all the time (I put that in quotes, it's not exactly the same as, say, swimming with dolphins, but the point is man and shark can inhabit the same parts of the ocean without one trying to devour the other, or the need for shark cages, etc. Now, Great Whites are another matter, but I don't like off the coast of Australia.)
Now, if caffiene levels in the ocean rise, what's going to happen to the sharks? Are they going to ever be able to get any sleep? Is their judgement going to be further impaired - I mean, they already confuse surfers with seals, are they likely to confuse divers with some sort of fish? Are they going to be constantly tired, irritable, yet alert?
Or will the effects be even more dramatic: will I go diving only to see sharks outputing hundreds of lines of poorly written but amazingly creative C code, at two in the morning?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Need a lift in the morning? Have a refreshing glass of seawater!
Despite what DarkHand says, THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA. Please DO NOT try this. The high concentrations of sea salt and other dissolved minerals destroy the benefits found in drinking ordinary water, making the drinker at risk of salt poisoning and even dehydration!
I can't believe the editors are allowing such dangerous advice to be posted on Slashdot, of all placed!
The sad fact is that the vast majority of the remaining dangerous pollutants are attributable to either coal-fired power generation or automobile use, which are both sacred cows the world over.
Would a desalination plant remove the caffine?
Yes and no. Desalination by reverse osmosis or distillation would remove the caffeine (and many other pharmaceutical byproducts) from sea water when making drinking water. But the concentrated salt water dumped out of the desalination plant would still contain these pollutants.
Standard treatment plants used for making drinking water from freshwater would probably NOT remove caffeine or other pharmaceuticals. At best, the chlorination/oxygenation/UV purification process might degrade the pharma chemicals. At worst, these purification processes might convert the pharma chemicals into even more toxic analogs of the chemicals.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Reverse osmosis doesn't necessarily remove everything; the city of Santa Barbara, CA built a RO-based desalination plant in the early 90s, at a cost of roughly $40 million. When they fired up the plant (spring of 92, IIRC), the water it put out still tasted a bit of the sea, according to most observers.
However, during the plant's construction, the drought that had motivated the project had subsided. So after a few weeks of operational testing (i.e. none of its output went into the distribution system), the plant was mothballed. AFAIK, it's never been started up since.
One researcher in the article is quoted as saying, We have almost no information about what kind of problems caffeine can cause in nature. It is a poison and at very high concentrations it can affect the nervous system. We don't know the kind of environmental effect caffeine can have on the ecosystem and this is something that should be thoroughly investigated .
Based on what I know about biochemistry, this isn't necessarily going to be a big problem for humans. Assuming that the concentration of seawater is 100 micrograms (.0001 g) per liter and the lethal dose (LD) of caffeine is 4 grams in humans, one human would have to drink 40,000 litres of seawater to reach the lethal dose. That excludes the decomposition of caffeine in the body that would occur while drinking that much seawater.
Of course, there could be problems with biomagnification. If fish or other sea animals can't break down the caffeine, it may stay absorbed in their fat. Then, people who eat those sea creatures will have much larger of doses of caffeine at one time.
Personally, I wouldn't be concerned until they take into consideration all of the other factors that are involved. There are high concentrations of many molecules in seawater, but that isn't necessarily a problem.