Honolulu harbor on the island of O‘ahu in Hawaii.
NASA Earth Observatory, Landsat 7 satellite
Largest-Ever Algae Bloom Hits China
View Caption +
A view shows an algae covered public beach in Qingdao, northeast China's Shandong province on July 4, 2013. The seas off China have been hit by their largest-ever growth of algae, ocean officials said.
Getty Images
View Caption +
Pictures showed beach-goers swimming and playing in the green tide in the eastern city of Qingdao, while bulldozers shoveled up tons of algae from the sand.
Getty Images
View Caption +
The State Oceanic Administration said on its website that the algae, enteromorpha prolifera, started to appear a week ago and had spread across an area of 28,900 square kilometers (7,500 square miles).
Getty Images
View Caption +
The previous largest bloom was in 2008 when it affected around 13,000 square kilometers, it said.
Getty Images
View Caption +
Qingdao officials said they had removed around 7,335 tonnes of algae, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Getty Images
View Caption +
The algal phenomenon is usually caused by an abundance of nutrients in the water, especially phosphorus, although the triggers for the enormous blooms which began to appear in the Yellow Sea in 2007 remain uncertain.
Hong Wu/Getty Images
View Caption +
The China Daily quoted professor Bao Xianwen, of the Qingdao-based Ocean University of China, as saying: "It must have something to do with the change in the environment, but we are not scientifically sure about the reasons."
Hong Wu/Getty Images
View Caption +
The algae are not toxic nor detrimental to water quality, but lead to extreme imbalances in marine ecosystems by consuming large quantities of oxygen and creating hydrogen sulphide.
Getty Images
View Caption +
Here, workers collect seaweed with a net by the Qingdao coastline on July 12, 2012.
Getty Images
Related Links
Fukushima's radioactive water leaks may be scarier, but in terms of outright deadliness to aquatic life, the Honolulu Harbor molasses leak may have it beat.
With so much waste and not enough resources to replenish our supply, Trace looks at the myriad of ways we produce trash.
DCI
The brown plume of the sticky stuff was seen Monday and Tuesday after 1,400 tons (about 233,000 gallons) of the sugar processing byproduct leaked from a shipping container on Sunday. It spread from Sand Island into Ke’ehi Lagoon (pictured above) and quickly sank to the bottom of the industrial bay, where it started robbing the water of oxygen and smothering animal life.
Imagesof vast numbers of dead fish, eels crabs and other sea life have been posted, while work crews have been kept busy gathering and disposing of dead fish in order to minimize the impacts of the mass die off and not turn the place into a buffet for sharks.
Dead fish picked up on the beach at Ke’ehi Lagoon.
Elizabeth Miles
Despite the apparent novelty of the disaster, however, it is not unprecedented. In July a similar spill into a reservoir in the Mexican state of Jalisco wiped out 500 metric tons of fish. There, the loss of fish caused immediate and continuing hardships to fishermen and local eateries that relied on the fish for their fare.
In Honolulu Bay, the oxygen-deprived bottom-dwelling fish have been seen coming to the surface, away from the molasses, attempting to find more "breathable" water, reported Ruth Yender of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Response and Restoration. The State of Hawaii Department of Health Hazard Evaluation and Emergency Response Office (HEER) has taken the lead on responding to the spill, she explained, because unlike oil, molasses is not classified as a hazardous material.
Ultimately, the solution to the leak and fish die off will be for the molasses to be flushed out of the harbor and out to sea, where it will be diluted and degraded into harmless compounds. To flush out the harbor will require a lot of rain, however. Dilution is also the reason that the radiation levels from the Fukushina leaks are not considered a problem beyond the immediate area where the water leaked.
Sadly, there is no sign that Honolulu Harbor is going to be flushed out soon, said HEER communications officer Janice Okubo.
"Unfortunately it's very sunny and not raining," she told Discovery News on Thursday.
"With the weak and variable tidal currents in the local area, and no significant rainfall in the forecast, (NOAA) expects that the contaminated water may require a week or longer to completely flush out of the Honolulu Harbor and Ke’ehi Lagoon," Yender reported.
In the meantime, scientists will be monitoring dissolved oxygen levels and keeping their fingers crossed.