Full text of "Oceanus"

See other formats

Oceanus

Volume 33, Number 2, Summer 1 990

?i$$^ '• ; >^::~*

: SfiP/S * •{ •%>..

~ \\^s& $:-~&$''Ji:\

:- I \.S\S^ i"—-.' ^V,^ --^— N^'H ./»^ ^*« • *•',

1 -l • -C^/-.':" .-".•rv.'/'i-^ .* •. .'
J X-/:T':.><: \- ,:r.- '••:v.vV,x- j ••

X.. ••»• . . ». -«--» *•*• J •'

• ""• *^ •"••• •* »*^

> . /::•:••:• :<;.>•/

» » /.-.•.•*..• :-.^.'i

'\^ k+^4

•v:<.'::/-.v*:

• • .— •'.;••:••.•:••.•••;

v Vl*».' . . •.•.•.••!

i > '. ' f>

6i^ '^

ISSN 0029-8182

Oceanus

The International Magazine of Marine Science and Policy

Volume 33, Number 2, Summer 1990

Paul R. Ryan, Editor
T. M. Hawley, Assistant Editor
Sara L. Ellis, Editorial Assistant
JoAnn Muramoto, Editorial Intern

Robert W. Bragdon, Advertising Coordinator

Editorial Advisory Board

1930

Robert D. Ballard, Director of the Center for Marine Exploration, WHOI

James M. Broadus, Director of the Marine Policy Center, WHOI

Henry Charnock, Professor of Physical Oceanography, University of Southampton, England

Gotthilf Hempel, Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar Research, West Germany

Charles D. Hollister, Vice-President and Associate Director for External Affairs, WHOI

John Imbrie, Henry L. Doherty Professor of Oceanography, Brown University

John A. Knauss, U.S. Undersecretary for the Oceans and Atmosphere, NOAA

Arthur E. Maxwell, Director of the Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas

Timothy R. Parsons, Professor, Institute of Oceanography, University of British Columbia, Canada

Allan R. Robinson, Gordon McKay Professor of Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Harvard University

David A. Ross, Chairman, Department of Geology and Geophysics, and Sea Grant Coordinator, WHOI

Published by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Guy W. Nichols, Chairman of the Board of Trustees
John H. Steele, President of the Corporation
Charles A. Dana III, President of the Associates

Craig E. Dorman, Director of the Institution

The views expressed in Oceanus are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect those of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Permission to photocopy for
internal or personal use or the
internal or personal use of
specific clients is granted by
Oceanus magazine to libraries
and other users registered with
the Copyright Clearance Center
(CCC), provided that the base
fee of $2.00 per copy of the
article is paid directly to CCC,
21 Congress Street, Salem, MA
01970. Special requests should
be addressed to Oceanus
magazine.
ISSN 0029-8182/83 $2.00 + .05

Editorial correspondence: Oceanus magazine, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543. Telephone: (508) 548-1400, extension 2386.

Subscription correspondence, U.S. and Canada: All orders should be addressed to Oceanus Subscriber
Service Center, P.O. Box 641 9, Syracuse, NY 1321 7. Individual subscription rate: $25 a year; Libraries
and institutions, $80. Current copy price, $6.25; 25-percent discount on current copy orders for five or
more; 40-percent discount to bookstores and newsstands. Please make checks payable to the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution.

Subscribers outside the U.S. and Canada, please write: Oceanus, Cambridge University Press, The Ed-
inburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 2RU, England. Individual subscription rate: £22 a
year; Students, £19; Libraries and Institutions, £40. Single-copy price, £9. Please make checks payable to
Cambridge University Press.

When sending change of address, please include mailing label. Claims for missing numbers from the U.S.
and Canada will be honored within three months of publication; overseas, five months.

ive

Gift

of the

Sea

1930

come
aboard
yourself

now:

Oceanus

Published by Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution

Domestic Subscription Order Form: U.S. & Canada*

Please make checks payable to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Canadian Subscribers add $3.00 for postage.
The International Magazine
of Marine Science and Policy

Please enter my subsc nption to OCEANUS for
Individual

D one year at $25.00
D two years at $45.00
D three years at $65.00
Library or Institution:
D one year at $80.00

Please send MY Subscription to:

D payment enclosed.

(we request prepayment)
D bill me

Please send a GIFT Subscription to:

Name

(please print)

Street address

City State Zip

*Subscribers other than U.S. & Canada please use form
inserted at last page.

I, 'HI

Name

(please print)

Street address

City

Donor's Name
Address

State

— Craig E. Dorman
Director, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Z,p

HAS THE SUBSCRIPTION COUPON BEEN DETACHED?

If someone else has
made use of the
coupon attached to
this card, you can still
subscribe. Just send a
check — $25 for one
year (four issues), $45
for two, $65 for
three — to this addresss:

Ocean us magazine
P.O. Box 641 9
Syracuse, NY 1321 7-641 9

Please make checks
payable to Woods
Hole Oceanographic
Institution

1930

Oceanus magazine
P.O. Box 6419
Syracuse, NY 13217-6419

necessarily reflect those of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

I ISSN 0029-8182/83 $2.00 + .05

Editorial correspondence: Oceanus magazine, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543. Telephone: (508) 548-1400, extension 2386.

Subscription correspondence, U.S. and Canada: All orders should be addressed to Oceanus Subscriber
Service Center, P.O. Box 6419, Syracuse, NY 13217. Individual subscription rate: $25 a year; Libraries
and institutions, $80. Current copy price, $6.25; 25-percent discount on current copy orders for five or
more; 40-percent discount to bookstores and newsstands. Please make checks payable to the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution.

When sending change of address, please include mailing label. Claims for missing numbers from the U.S.
and Canada will be honored within three months of publication; overseas, five months.

Director's
Statement

e are often asked about the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution's position on
environmental issues, including the com-
plex topic of waste management. As a
research and education center, dedicated to the highest
standards of scientific and technical excellence, our duty
is to foster the pursuit of objective research and educa-
tion, not to endorse a particular position. We strive to
ensure that the work of science is conducted in an open
environment, where ideas, no matter how unconven-
tional, can flow freely and be openly debated.

This issue of Oceanus speaks to only a small portion
of the waste management issue — whether the ocean can
safely play a role in some kind of waste disposal. All
the opinions expressed in the following articles and
editorials are those of the individual authors and not
necessarily those of the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution. We hope these articles will extend and
enhance a debate that is too often driven by emotion
rather than fact.

— Craig E. Dorman
Director, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

OCEAN DISPOSAL RECONSIDERED

5 Introduction
The Ocean and Waste Management
by Derek W. Spencer

Research is needed on whether regions of the deep ocean
hold the potential to be a safe repository for certain types
of wastes.

Editorial

Options for Waste: Space, Land, or Sea?

by Charles D. Hollister
With land waste-disposal options diminishing, there is a
critical need to examine some intriguing deep-ocean
disposal possibilities.

The influence of effluents

Rebuttal
V^ Protecting the Oceans

JL «*X by Clifton E. Curtis

The author advocates a precautionary approach to waste
disposal, and clean production.

f^ ^\ Congress and Waste Disposal at Sea
/ 1 ty Thomas R. Kitsos and Joan M. Bondareff

With most ocean disposal legislated to end
December 31, 1991, opening a debate on changing these
laws will be difficult.

A Brief History of Ocean Disposal

/ ^y By Iver w- Duedall

The author reviews the state of international

disposal of wastes in the oceans under the London
Dumping Convention.

Whither the sludge?

Copyright © 1990 by the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution. Oceanus (ISSN 0029-8182) is published in March,
June, September, and December by the Woods Hole Oceano-
graphic Institution, 9 Maury Lane, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
02543. Second-class postage paid at Falmouth, Massachusetts;
Windsor, Ontario; and additional mailing points.
POSTMASTER: Send address change to Oceanus Subscriber
Service Center, P.O. Box 6419, Syracuse, NY 13217.

-v -v

i i

® Headings and Readings ©

O O

^\ | "\ Effects of Wastes on the Ocean: The Coastal
j^"y Example by Judith E. McDowell Capuzzo

Uncontrolled waste disposal in coastal areas
degrades the waters, and compromises fishing and
mariculture.

>f ' Editorial Cartoons and Public Perception

LJ ^ fry Michael A. Champ

* \*^s Cartoons are a powerful force in forging the
public's attitudes about the disposal of wastes at sea.

Coastal concerns

>| Detecting the Biological Effects of Deep-Sea
*^/ I Waste Disposal by John J. Stegeman
V^/ JL Studies of rattail fish at some deep-water sites
indicate exposure and biological responses to harmful
manmade chemicals.

Managing Dredged Materials

by Robert M. Bugler

There are many positive uses of "clean"
dredged material, such as habitat enhancement and
beach nourishment.

TOO OUT FOB THE
OKPERTDHCEABf

Cartoonists' views

Poet-Oceanographer

LETTERS
BOOKS

Herculean Labors to Clean Wastewater

by T. M. Hawley

Engineered ecosystems could be a big
improvement on Hercules's quick and dirty method
of sewage disposal.

two profiles: "The Profane" Edward D.
Goldberg by Joseph E. Brown, and "The Poet"
Paul Kilho Park by Michael A. Champ
Articles on two leading figures who have devoted their
lives to studying the disposal of wastes in the oceans.

COVER: Robert Mankoff is an editorial cartoonist whose work has
appeared in The New Yorker, most recently on April 23, 1990, with a
cover celebrating Earth Day. Other credits appear on page 86.

*•«

C "^^^r

\ PUERTO RICO Jk

(- — vj— ^^^-^N^^-a^—

Ocean disposal

sites around

the world,

according to

1985 statistics

of the London

Dumping
Convention.

JAPAN

I HONG KONG

V ZEALAND

Introduction

The Ocean and

Waste
Management

by Derek W. Spencer

n this issue, we examine several aspects
of waste disposal in the ocean — its his-
tory, effects, and future. More impor-
tantly, we ask whether the ocean may
have a legitimate role in optimal waste-man-
agement practices in the future.

The disposal of waste materials is one of the
most critical problems facing our nation and
the world. The burgeoning world population
and the associated increase in resource utiliza-
tion is creating a waste stream of gigantic pro-
portions and highly variable content. Present
waste-management practices are insufficient to
handle today's problems, yet further popula-
tion growth is inevitable.

The sheer volume of wastes, or the "waste
stream," together with threats to precious
ground water supplies and problems with
noise and odor pollution, have combined to
make landfill disposal sites a rapidly diminish-
ing resource. Such sites now handle more
than 80 percent of the U.S. waste stream. We

The United

States

annually

disposes of an

estimated 1.3

billion tonnes

of waste.

urgently need innovative and effective solutions for dealing with
wastes.

Human activities generate both unused and unusable products
of some kind. Historically, this material was destroyed by burning
or, more often, discarded in some place out of sight and mind.
From the dawn of civilization through the birth of the Industrial
Revolution, when the Earth's population was less than a billion and
the use of resources was small, such practices were often sufficient
and caused little detriment to the quality of human life. However,
this was not always the case as is evident by the inadequate treat-
ment of refuse that led, in medieval times, to explosions of rat
populations and the spread of bubonic plague.

Since the early 1800s, technological advances in disease control
and expanded food sources have engendered enormous growth of
the world's population, from somewhat less than a billion in 1800
to about 5.2 billion today, and projected to 6.5 to 7 billion by the
year 2000. This huge and continuing population growth, together
with increasing demands and expectations concerning quality of
life, is bringing great stress on our environment because of the high
volume of resources we use and the wastes we discard. Of the 5.2
billion people who now inhabit Earth, more than 40 percent are
under 15 years old. Thus, the stage is set for a continued mush-
rooming of the world's population, and the concomitant growth
of resource use and the waste stream.

It is difficult to obtain global data illustrating the extent of the
waste-management problem, but data from the United States—
which also has experienced great population growth — serve as
indicators. Annually, the United States disposes of an estimated
1.3 billion tonnes of wastes that fall, broadly, into the following
categories:

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW)
Sewage Sludge (wet)
Dredged Materials
Industrial Waste (wet and solid)

Millions of Tonnes Percent

180 14.1

300 23.4

400 31.3

How much waste is 1.3 billion tonnes? If it were all loaded into
10- ton trucks, and we lined up the trucks bumper- to-bumper, the
convoy would stretch around the Earth more than 20 times.
The garbage and trash (MSW) convoy, the smallest of the above
categories, would circle the globe almost three times, and it is
growing. But what happens to this garbage and trash now?
Because of aesthetic problems associated with "floatables," no U.S.
municipalities now dump garbage into the ocean and have not
done so since 1934. About 80 percent is landfilled in some 6,500
facilities, about 10 percent is burned in 155 large, modern incin-
erators, and about 10 percent is recycled. Can this continue?

More than 2,000 of the
nation's 6,500 landfills will
close within five years. This
means a loss of capacity of 51
million tonnes a year. New
landfill construction will
provide a capacity of only
about 18 million tonnes a
year. Because of noise
pollution problems, odor,
and hazards associated with
groundwater contamination,
we are running out of land to

devote to waste containment. Some 29 new incineration plants are
under construction, but a further 64 have been held up by litigation.
Burning may seem an answer, but incineration reduces garbage to
about only 25 percent of its initial mass. Disposal of the residual
toxic ash also is a management problem.

Many heavily urbanized states export their garbage. New
Jersey, for example, now exports more than 55 percent of its MSW,
mostly to other states, but some to foreign countries. The number
of states and countries that will accept this load is steadily and
rapidly declining.

Jerry Schubel of the State University of New York at Stony
Brook, in an address to the Marine Board of the National Academy
of Sciences, has succinctly encapsulated the management problems
of MSW with his statement — "There is too much of it, it is too
persistent, it is too 'toxic,' and we have too few places on land to
put it."

Much of MSW is, in fact, reducible or reusable. There are now
some enlightened manufacturers who have found substantial
economies in reducing excessive packaging or have taken advantage
of products that are recyclable and /or biodegradable. A great deal
more effort must be expended in source reduction and in recycling.
Some states, towns, and municipalities have adopted mandatory
recycling — more will have to do so.

However, as the article by Iver Duedall points out (see page 29),
municipal solid wastes are just part of the problem. The large vol-
umes of dredge spoils, which after 1991 will be the only solid
material that may be legally deposited in the marine environment,
pose some problems as outlined by Robert Engler (see page 63).
However, the management of sewage sludge and industrial wastes
poses the greatest problems. With the latter, in particular, there
are some extremely hazardous products, including highly toxic
chemicals and radioactive materials.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set a
national goal of 25 percent for reduction and recycling by 1992.
Even if this can be met, there will still be much more waste than can

Landfills, such as

New York City's

Freshkills — the

world's largest — are a

vanishing breed.

Options
for excess
waste are

limited:

air, ocean,

or subseabed

sediments.

be accommodated by land-based disposal systems now at hand, or
planned for the immediate future. The options for this excess are
limited: we can put it in the air, the ocean, or subsea sediments.
While some believe that space may be an option, technology and
economic factors clearly obviate this possibility.

All waste-disposal options pose similar environmental
concerns. Risks to human health, loss of valuable
resources, and environmental degradation are common to
all disposal alternatives, whether land-based, aquatic, or atmos-
pheric. The transport, fate, and effects of wastes discharged to any
environment are dependent on physical, chemical, and biological
processes that control contaminants within that environment.

Today, our disposal-management practices do not address the
broadly based nature of the above-mentioned risks. In the last 20
years, legislation concerning environmental issues was passed as a
result of crisis management. Laws were enacted on a piecemeal
basis following the detection of pollution in freshwater and marine
environments, in air, or on land.

In response to these laws, a maze of overlapping regulations
were developed, all attempting to impose control at the point of
contaminant introduction to the environment.

Our failure to deal adequately with waste-management issues
is well illustrated by the recent concern over ocean dumping. The
public outcry during the spring and summer of 1988, coupled with
unusual environmental events (for example, mass mortalities of
marine mammals, medical wastes on beaches, disease in com-
mercial fisheries, and so on), again led to congressional action for
the cessation of dumping sludge and industrial waste in the ocean
by the end of 1991.

Environmentalists, fishermen, and businessmen aligned with
coastal tourism praised this action as tough environmental legis-
lation protecting our coastal waters. Yet, the causal links between
ocean dumping and the observed environmental events of the
summer of 1988 have not been defined and, in many instances,
there is no relationship whatsoever.

The contribution from Judith McDowell Capuzzo (see page
39) indicates that the input of chemical contaminants from
ocean dumping is only a small proportion of the total
chemical contaminant burden to coastal environments. Untreated
sewage effluents, land-based runoff, industrial effluents, and
dredged materials are quantitatively more important sources
of persistent chemical contaminants, such as chlorinated hydro-
carbons and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (see page 54),
than is sewage sludge.

Cessation of ocean dumping will not reverse the increasing
trends in coastal degradation that have become more widespread
despite the perceived progressive action in environmental

• mm. vaatm

legislation. It is vitally
important that we recognize
the many sources of marine
pollution and install
programs that can effec-
tively solve the problems.

There is now wide
recognition that inadequate
waste control and manage-
ment has contributed to our
social problems as a nation
and as citizens of the world.
Present problems will be

magnified greatly in the future unless some bold, and effective,
new approaches are introduced. Many who have considered the
issues advocate what is essentially a two-step approach:

• Conservation: waste reduction by source reduction and recycling.

• Multimedia disposal: to minimize risks.

Increased efforts in conservation will be essential. Programs
such as the 3P program (Pollution Prevention Pays) developed by
the 3M Company must be adopted by more industries. Michael A.
Champ and Paul Kilho Park (see page 77) have indicated elsewhere
that the 3P program reduces waste by product reformulation,
process modification, equipment redesign, recovery of wastes for
reuse, and reduction of packaging. The program has led to reduced
costs, improved technologies and products, conservation of
resources, and improved public and environmental health.

Champ and Park also point out that the Clean Japan Center has
developed extensive and effective programs for recycling and
resource recovery from wastes. State and local recycling programs
are now emerging and more must come. However, conservation,
at best, can reduce, but not
eliminate, the problem.
Wastes, in quantities
requiring well-considered
disposal strategies, will
remain.

We must design opti-
mal waste-management
programs that minimize
risks to human health and
the environment. In the
United States, present
legislation does not allow
the implementation, or even
consideration, of optimal
practices. In particular, the

Plowing through the

sludge: Americans

dispose of 300 million

tonnes of sewage sludge

each year.

Tokyo survived

Godzilla, but the

plastic trash now

eating up Tokyo Bay

has the Japanese

scrambling to cut

plastic use.

Politics has

played, and

will continue

to play, a
dominant role

in waste-
management

programs.

"ocean option" has been almost discarded. As the contribution
by Champ illustrates (see page 45), this state of affairs has arisen
largely out of public concern for a healthful coastal environment
and a lack of public awareness of what the major sources of chronic
pollution in the coastal ocean are, and what the ocean, in its totality,
is really like.

Ideally, waste-management strategies should consider all
options and include safety, scientific information, available or
needed technology, and economic factors. In reality, as Thomas R.
Kitsos of the U.S. House of Representatives Merchant Marine and
Fisheries Committee, and others, have stated "... waste disposal
decisions most often occur in response to discrete issues, the factual
and perceptual bases of which change constantly as technical
information and public awareness expand." Politics has played,
and will continue to play, a dominant role. Political strategies for
productive cooperation among countries, states, municipalities,
and industrial organizations must be an integral part of waste-
management programs. Kitsos and Joan Bondareff review the
development of current policies on ocean waste disposal (see
page 23).

Many ocean scientists and engineers are concerned that options
that could minimize the risks associated with the disposal of many
waste materials are now spurned because of current law and public
misunderstanding.

More than 70 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by the
ocean and, although we do not inhabit the ocean, it is essential to
our welfare. The ocean's ability to store and transport heat from
the sun controls and moderates our weather and climate. We reap
many resources from the ocean, including food and minerals. The
ocean coastal environment is a major recreational resource in
almost every country. It is a resource we cannot afford to lose by
careless, indiscriminate acts.

The coastal boundary is only a small fraction of the total
volume of the ocean. However, it is the area of principal
interaction with man and, as indicated by McDowell Capuzzo, it is
an extremely productive region. Of all the ocean regions, the
coastal zone receives the predominant impact of human activities,
from rivers and the continental atmosphere to direct utilization for
industrial and recreational purposes.

The coastal regions supply most of the resources that are
currently harvested from the sea, principally fish, sand,
gravel, oil, and gas. However, the scope of coastal regions
contrasts markedly with the rest of the ocean. The vast, deep,
abyssal hills and plains of the mid-latitude regions of the Atlantic
and Pacific oceans are deserts. Life is sparse and mineral wealth
almost nonexistent.

Our understanding of the many and varied regimes enclosed
by ocean basins has increased enormously in the last 30 years. We

know the major processes that drive water motion. We know
how and where the water-masses originate. We know the major
processes that transport materials in the ocean and we have
substantial information on the rates at which these processes
operate. We know that, while the ocean mixes laterally on time-
scales of days to months, it mixes vertically on much longer time
scales, up to thousands of years. We know the composition of
virtually all marine sediments and the rates at which they
accumulate.

Charles Hollister points out (see page 13) that we know where
there are vast areas of quiescent, stable ocean bottom with
oozes hundreds of feet thick that have accumulated slowly
and steadily for millions of years. We know, too, of other areas that
are stirred and mixed by major "benthic storms." We know a great
deal about the life that inhabits many ocean regions, what is
required for its sustenance, and what may be devastating to its
existence. In short, we now have the knowledge to assess which
ocean environments may be suitable, or unsuitable, repositories for
many wastes.

Our present understanding of the probability of impact to man
from the use of these sites leads us to believe that they may, in
many instances, provide reduced risk and more optimal oppor-
tunities for future waste-management plans. Studies at such
organizations as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have
shown us that, in general, the ocean is quite robust and that
internal feedback processes resist and ameliorate change particu-
larly when perturbations are at a rate that is consistent with the
ocean's capacity to assimilate.

The concept of the "fragile ocean" arises in regions where
human activities have exceeded the capacity of the ocean to
absorb wastes. These are mostly in coastal sites associated
with major metropolitan areas, such as Boston Harbor and the New
York Bight. In such coastal regions, the total contaminant burden
derives from many sources. Sewage effluents, land-based runoff,
industrial effluents, atmospheric inputs, disposal of dredged
materials, and sewage sludge all contribute to the overburdened
ocean. In the future, while carefully controlled and monitored
releases to coastal regions may be considered, it is the deep ocean
that offers the greatest potential for low-risk waste-management
options.

Although we can point to the potential of regions of the deep
ocean as a waste repository, there is still much to learn about the
interaction of wastes and the marine environment. Perhaps the
most troubling aspect of the present legislative regime is that no
government agency is presently charged with the responsibility to
explore the ocean option. No funding is available for research on
the environmental effects of ocean waste disposal, or on the
technology for waste emplacement and monitoring.

The concept of

the "fragile

ocean" arises

in regions

where human

activities

exceed the

capacity of the

ocean to
absorb wastes.

"I don't know why I don't care about the bottom
of the ocean, but I don't"

With the mounting volumes of waste, pressures for ocean
utilization will increase. One can imagine the dear lady who
doesn't care about the bottom of the ocean (see New Yorker Magazine
cartoon above) standing outside her stately mansion with a
mountain of garbage encroaching on her backyard, saying: "Now I
know why I should care about the bottom of the ocean." <*•»

Derek W. Spencer is a Senior Scientist in the Chemistry Department
of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Until recently, he
was the Associate Director for Research, a position he held for
many years.

Editorial

Options for
Waste: Space,
Land, or Sea?

by Charles D. Hollister

n the remote settlements of the Himalayas, villag-
ers would not throw away a tin can, because a tin
can is useful. They can cook in it, drink from it,
put their prayer beads in it. Little trash is gener-
ated in those mountain villages. Our industrialized so-
cieties, however, produce vast quantities of waste, some
of which is hazardous. We have so much hazardous
waste, that if we put all of it in tractor-trailers, the trucks
would stretch one-and-a-half times around the globe at
the equator (51,500 kilometers).

Waste is an unavoidable result of human activity:
the more humans, the more waste. Efforts to deal with
our prolific waste output have proven so dismally
ineffectual and uncoordinated that it is not entirely
ridiculous to suggest family planning as a future waste-
management option.

We must minimize the amount of waste we gener-
ate, produce "cleaner" waste, and recycle or reuse as
much waste as possible. We are far from achieving
these ends, but even if we did, we still would have a
waste problem. Not all waste can be recycled or treated,
and treatment itself produces waste. For instance, incin-

eration destroys the hazardous constituents in certain materials, but
incineration pollutes the air and the leftover ash is usually toxic.
Chemical neutralization — putting a buffer into acidic waste — can
reduce toxicity, but the end result is still waste.

No matter how much we recycle, no matter how clean-burning
our industries become, the terrible truth is that by the end of the
day, we will be left with waste. This waste is not going to disap-
pear, ever, no matter how fervently we scream: "Not in my term of
office!" (NIMTOO) and "Not in my backyard!" (NIMBY). We have
only four backyards: space, air, land and sea.

Shooting Waste Into Space

Shooting waste out of Earth orbit might sound attractive, but it
is the most problematic option of all. For high-volume waste, such
as garbage, we could not afford to make enough rockets. And the
production of a rocket itself produces large quantities of toxic
waste.

Neither are rockets feasible for even small-volume, high-level
radioactive waste, which contains plutonium. To get rid of this
kind of waste, that is, the amount on hand by the year 2000, we
would have to guarantee liftoff of 1,000 Saturn-V rockets. And the
high-level nuclear waste we continue to generate would require a
Saturn-V takeoff about once a week, forever. We also would have
to guarantee no Challenger-type disaster because vaporized
plutonium is one of the deadliest substances known.

Land Disposal

Land covers 29 percent of the planet. If we exclude communi-
ties, national parkland, and areas underlain by groundwater, we
are left with mostly mountain and desert regions. These areas
represent about 5 percent of the planet's total land area — available,
theoretically anyway, for waste disposal.

Land disposal is our government's backyard of choice for all
wastes. The most serious disadvantage of land disposal is the
potential for endangering drinking-water supplies. Recently,
strengthened laws limit the options for land disposal, and public
opposition has made siting new landfills difficult, if not impossible.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that within 20
years, 80 percent of all existing landfills will be closed.

The Ocean

Our only other backyard, the ocean, covers 71 percent of
the Earth. We have dumped all kinds of waste into the seas.
However, we have grown increasingly uncertain about whether
the ocean is the place for wastes. In fact, the U.S. Congress enacted
legislation that prohibits putting industrial waste and sewage
sludge in the ocean after December 31, 1991. We should and must

A Wall Poster Seen at EPA*

The ABCs of Waste Disposal

NIMBY. . .Not In My Back Yard

NIMFYE. . .Not In My Front Yard Either

PIITBY. . .Put It In Their Back Yard

NIMEY. . .Not In My Election Year

NIMTOO.. .Not In My Term Of Office

LULU... Locally Unavailable Land Use

NOPE... Not On Planet Earth

*Environmental Protection Agency

protect the seas, but as
science progresses
and we learn more
about the ocean, these
laws may be amended.
If the colossal waste-
disposal problem
continues to remain
unresolved, we have
an obligation to
reconsider the ocean's
possible role in waste
management.

The ocean is a
prime dilutor and
buffer: seawater
dilutes material and
ocean currents spread
it around. Could
ocean dilution be an
acceptable way of

lessening or eliminating the toxicity of certain waste that cannot be
recycled or reused? Much more research is necessary before we
can give ocean dilution the nod, but there are possibilities that
merit scrutiny — such as the blizzard-like storms that occur in the
deep sea.

In the early 1980s, my colleagues and I discovered episodic
currents in the deep sea strong enough to lift sediment from the
seafloor. By deep-sea standards, these are extremely fast and
powerful.

These currents, dubbed "benthic storms," stir up the bottom,
pick up mud, and distribute it downstream onto kilometer-high
mud mounds more than 300 kilometers across. The biggest super-
tanker full of sewage sludge would hold a thousandth of the total
load of mud carried by a single benthic storm. We have directly
recorded benthic storms, about six a year, in the western North and
South Atlantic. Benthic storms probably occur elsewhere in the
global ocean as well.

What would happen if waste were introduced into the center
of a stormy region at a depth of about four kilometers? We really
don't know; we need more research and experimentation. But we
think we can predict where particulate waste is likely to go because
we have determined where the mud picked up by the current even-
tually goes. The mud is laid downstream on the mountainous piles
as a miniscule addition to the millions of cubic meters of mud that
have been collecting there for millions of years.

Even if this idea proved feasible for certain kinds of high-
volume, mildly toxic waste, it probably would not work for low-

One vast region

of the central

North Pacific

might be a

safe place

to bury

wastes

in the deep

subseabed.

volume, very toxic, heavy metals and radioactive materials-
substances we really do not want dispersed in the ocean. But for
these types of waste, the ocean may offer another alternative based
on containment.

Mud Like Peanut Butter

About half the Earth is covered by vast underwater fields of
clayey mud resembling creamy peanut butter. Miles thick,
these muds carpet vast areas of deep-sea basins and certain
areas of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, which extends to 200
nautical miles from our coasts. The particles of this oceanic peanut
butter are so fine-grained that they are measured in thousandths of
a millimeter — the finest of any dust on the planet. Negatively
charged ions on the edges of these extremely fine mud particles are
attracted to the positively charged ions of such heavy metals as
cadmium, zinc, mercury, iron, magnesium, lead, cesium and
plutonium. This attraction causes the heavy-metal ions to stick to
the mud particles.

Another important characteristic of this abyssal mud is its
elasticity. Calculations suggest that if we strapped four 55-gallon
drums together, added a heavy nose-cone on the end of one drum
(to ensure that the drums would not fall sideways), and pushed the
whole package off a ship, it would plummet at the rate of about 80
kilometers an hour through three to five kilometers of water and
disappear into the mud. Experiments in the deep sea with missile-
shaped objects suggest that the hole this package would make on
penetrating the muddy seafloor would actually close up. Until we
perform more experiments with drums at sea, however, we cannot
know for sure.

One area that looks especially attractive as a potential site for
burying containers of waste beneath the seafloor is an immense
portion of the central North Pacific that is nearly six kilometers
deep. The geologic history of this area, which we have assessed
from cores of the seafloor, is monumentally dull, a prime criterion
for a safe repository.

For the last 65 million years — while the Alps and Himalayas
were pushed up, the Isthmus of Panama was closed up, and
many ice ages came and went — nothing happened in the
central North Pacific basin except the usual unremitting shower of
clay dust collecting on the bottom at the rate of a millimeter every
few thousand years. With that history, we can predict that the like-
lihood of a geologic catastrophe occurring and jeopardizing buried
containers in this area within the next million years is very low.

But no container lasts forever. What happens when the waste
leaks out? There are several barriers inherent in this plan: the
waste would be placed well below the limit of animals and thus
isolated from the food chain; and gravity and the powerful adhe-

sive quality of the mud would keep the waste containers down.
But this is not to say that we know it all. We do not know exactly
what the chemical reaction between the sediment and waste will
be. We do not know how far, or even if, leaked waste would mi-
grate through the surrounding mud.

The ocean disposal options described here pose intriguing
questions to both science and technology. Until the issues
are resolved with rigorous research and experimentation, we
will never know how practicable they are. As a scientist, a citizen
of Planet Earth, and one concerned for the planet's well-being, I
think we have little choice but to explore every possible alternative.
If we can't shoot our waste to the stars, can't continue to put it
in landfills, and can't place it in the ocean, what are we going to do
with it?

Charles D. Hollister is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Ocean-
ographic Institution, and Vice President of the WHOI Corporation.

"We have

little

choice

but to

explore

every

possible

alternative.

From research to the effective application of research. . .

...the course charted by the Coastal Research
Center (CRC) at the Woods Hole Oceano-
graphic Institution focuses on the multi-disci-
plinary study of complex topics in eoastal areas.

The CRC supports and encourages held and
laboratory studies of coastal processes on a local,
national and international scale. As an integral
part of the WHOI organizational structure,
C7?C fulfills its mandate by facilitating multi-
disciplinary collaborations among coastal re-
searchers. CRC support can be direct funding,
student research, stipends, small boats, experi-
mental flumes and field instruments.

And CRC programs include studies into the
assimilative capacity of the coastal oceans, hori-
zontal and vertical transport of particulars matter,
chemical constituents in seawater and sediments.

For more information contact:

The Coastal Research Center
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Woods Hole, MA 02543 U.S.A.

Telephone (508) 548-1400, Ext. 2418 or 2853

Telex: 951679

WindjammM

Step aboard for a great adventure.

Come, sail away with us-
to a Caribbean you never
knew existed. Sail away on
a tall ship that harks back to
another time. Sail away to
islands not normally visited
by others. Lush islands...
rich with history, warm
people, lovely clear blue
waters, sugar white sandy
beaches, and a surround-
ing hospitality you will
never forget. Sail away
mate. Cornea' windjammin1
with us.

Step aboard a great adven-
ture. Your comfortable and
private air-conditioned
accommodations are only
the beginning. You'll experi-
ence sumptuous home
cooking with your new-
found shipmates. You'll
enjoy exotic tropical fruits, freshly
caught seafood, and native dishes that sat-
isfy the most discerning. Best of all, you'll
be sharing the romance. The romance of
tall ship sailing.

With stiff canvas and a following wind
you will experience the sea unlike any other
sea voyage. Your experienced crew will
show you the ropes. But the choices are
yours throughout the cruise. You can either

participate in the sailing of
the ship or you can lay back
and let your fully trained
crew handle everything. You
can swim, snorkle, fish, go
beach-combing or sightsee-
ing. Or, you can simply open
that best-seller and work on
your tan. It's up to you.
You can select from
among six of our ships.
Cruises set sail on different
itineraries throughout the
Caribbean. All offer that bare-
foot informality that has

become so endearing to the many people

who have sailed with us time and time again .
Do yourself a big favor in life. Come

back to the sea. Come windjammin'. Six

day cruises start at $675. See

your travel agent or call us toll free

at 1-800-327-2601 (Florida 1-800-

432-3364). Windjammer

Barefoot Cruises, Ltd.,

P.O. Box 120, Dept. 491 8

Miami Beach, FL 33119-0120.

r _ _ _ _ Please send me Windjammer Cruise information _ _ _ _ .

Name_

Address.
City

State, Zip.

.Dept.

Rebuttal

Protecting
the

Oceans

by Clifton E. Curtis

he 20th anniversary of Earth Day, like a doctor's visit
for a physical, provided a special opportunity to
examine the health of the planet. In that regard, the
ocean — which in my view is the planet's "heart"- —is
thumping along vibrantly, as a whole. But alarming
damage to some of its coastal edges calls for dramatic restorative
measures, along with special efforts to keep the disease from
spreading.

The oceans are on the receiving end of a tremendous amount
of polluting substances. By all accounts, 80 to 90 percent of those
pollutants come from land-based sources — pipeline discharges,
runoff into coastal waters (both directly and indirectly via rivers),
and atmospheric inputs. The remainder comes from ocean dump-
ing, and operational and accidental pollution from vessels and
other offshore sources.

In recent years, people have devoted special attention to ending
ocean dumping of all toxic wastes. We have made significant
progress, considering the global moratorium on radioactive waste
dumping at sea that has been in place since 1983; the proposed
global phase-out by 1994 of ocean incineration of toxic wastes;
regional (North Sea) decisions to end industrial and sewage-sludge
dumping at sea; and new national laws, such as the United States
prohibiting ocean dumping of industrial wastes and sewage
sludge, as well as ocean incineration.

Ocean dumping, however, is only a small fraction of the
pollutant loadings. For land-based pollution, the real culprit, we
are way behind the curve. Efforts are under way in the United
States to deal with land-based pollution much more effectively-

We need to

adopt two

principles: a

precautionary

approach to

waste

disposal,

and clean

production.

through amendments to the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act-
but even these proposed changes are only a step in the right
direction. Much more needs to be done at national and interna-
tional levels.

But there is a broader issue requiring even greater attention:
pollution prevention. When I toured Prince William Sound, just
a few weeks after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, one of the T-shirts on
sale made the point that "An ounce of prevention is worth 11
million gallons of cure." For marine and coastal ecosystems, as
well as for the entire planet, that theme is right on target.

However, as long as decision-makers are enticed and
lobbied to employ new or better ocean disposal options-
such as deep-ocean storms to flush toxic waste into sedi-
ment mounds or around the globe, or abyssal plains for burial — the
health of the oceans and the planet will only worsen. To use an
economic analogy, putting toxic waste in the ocean, whatever the
disposal method, is akin to a business owner myopically concen-
trating on increasing profits in the next quarter, while his
company's infrastructure and state-of-the art capabilities become
less and less stable, jeopardizing long-term survival.

What's needed most of all is the unequivocal adoption and
implementation of two related principles: a precautionary ap-
proach to waste disposal, and clean production. I'm confident that,
eventually, both of these principles will be essential cornerstones
to the protection of the oceans and planet. Both are attracting a
growing number of adherents, especially in western and northern
European countries, as well as the United States. The real issue,
though, is whether they will soon enough become accepted practice
around the globe.

At present, with a few important exceptions, the benefit of
doubt regarding harm posed to the environment still goes to the
contaminator. That's a permissive principle, and the so-called
"assimilative capacity approach"- —referring to the amount of
material that can be contained within a body of seawater without
producing an unacceptable biological impact — has been the
accepted basis for the principle's validity in relation to ocean
pollutants.

Unfortunately, while the assimilative capacity concept may
have started out as a simple "dilute and disperse" approach
to addressing pollutant loadings, it has become unworkable
and unable to keep pace given the complexity and pervasive use
of chemical compounds. Modern industry produces about 300,000
new chemical compounds each year, and an estimated 70,000
chemical compounds are in daily use. The risk of analytical
mistakes is high, given inadequate knowledge. The potential for
severe adverse effects also is high, as has been demonstrated in
numerous examples of environmental degradation.

As with chemicals, the assimilative capacity approach clearly
has been overwhelmed by the diversity of biological species and
ecosystems with which it attempts to deal. Scientists are finding,
particularly in the deep ocean, far more species than were predicted
even 10 years ago. A large number of marine species are as yet
unidentified. Of those known to science, we are in the dark about
the way many of them function or interact with other species,
oceanic processes, or manmade substances. Moreover, there is
a wide range of responses to hazardous substances among species
and ecosystems, making it very difficult to predict impacts
accurately.

With respect to both chemicals and species, assimilative
capacity-related testing schemes focus heavily on limited
aspects of toxicity, persistence, and bioaccumulation.
Those schemes further attest to the high degree of uncertainty
underlying any efforts to quantify impacts and predict harm.
Continuing to contaminate the oceans, despite such uncertainty, is
tantamount to gambling with the environment, and future genera-
tions' quality of life.

In almost every case involving toxic substances, decision-
makers do not have enough information to know the effect of these
substances in the marine ecosystem. This is precisely what the
"precautionary approach" addresses. The approach is best defined
by its intent: to safeguard the marine ecosystem by, among other
things, eliminating and preventing the release of substances,
especially synthetic and persistent ones, if they may cause damage
or harmful effects — even when there is inconclusive scientific
evidence of a causal link between emissions and effects.

Under this approach, decision-makers faced with scientific
uncertainty regarding environmental impact, especially from
synthetic and persistent substances, must give the environment the
benefit of the doubt. Common sense dictates that we can no longer
afford to use the environment as a large-scale laboratory. Such
experimentation is unjust when permanent or long-term damage
can be done.

Clean production represents the means for implementing the
precautionary approach to pollution, in that it is designed to
prevent the generation of toxic waste in the first place.
Generally stated, it refers to ecologically compatible manufacturing
processes that use a minimal amount of raw materials, water, and
energy. Embodied in the definition are changes in existing proc-
esses, products, and intermediaries to avoid or eliminate toxic
waste and toxic products.

To meet clean-production criteria, manufactured goods must
be fully compatible with natural ecosystems — from raw material
selection, extraction, processing through product manufacture and
assemblage, and industrial and household use, to management of

"We can

no longer

afford to

use the

environment

as a

large-scale
laboratory."

Clifton E. Curtis is
Director of the
Oceanic Society, a
project of Friends of
the Earth, U.S.,
Washington, D.C.
On ocean pollution
matters, he serves
as an advisor to
Friends of the Earth,
International; the
International Union
for Conservation of
Nature and Natural
Resources; and
Greenpeace, Inter-
national.

the product at the end of its useful life. Clean production does not
include such "end-of-the-pipe" controls as filters and scrubbers, or
chemical, physical, and biological treatment. Other excluded
measures are those that reduce the volume of waste by incineration
or concentration, mask the hazard by dilution, or transfer pollut-
ants from one medium to another.

"Ahem," goes the response of some, "the precautionary
approach and clean production sound nice if you are living in
ecotopia, but what about the real world?" Yes, toxic wastes do
exist, and yes, it will take time before we can have effective precau-
tionary approaches and clean production in place. During the
interim, though, the only way to ensure that those principles
expeditiously become imbedded, mainstream practices is to require
that industries deal with toxic substances and wastes as close as
possible to the source of those substances and wastes.

In dealing with toxic wastes, especially synthetic and persistent
substances, new technologies that enable effective, protective
storage can be brought to bear at or near the source. At the
same time, other technologies for recycling those wastes, detoxify-
ing them, or destroying them in closed systems can be employed,
either now or as improved technologies come on line. Both tech-
nologies ought to be shared with developing countries. Although
the technologies are inconsistent, in the longer term, with clean
production, they can be used and further refined to help us get
over the hump.

In all of this, marine scientists have a very important role to
play, one that is at the same time challenging, exciting, and critical
to preserving the integrity of the oceans. Much more needs to be
known about species and marine ecosystems: how they function;
the interactions; the impacts of both natural- and human-derived
activities; and how to protect, restore, and preserve marine and
coastal ecosystems.

With such a focus — which will require the best talents and
skills of the marine scientific community and a concerted shift
toward the precautionary approach and clean production — we
have a fighting chance. Moreover, if we care about the long haul—
which is the only way to go that makes ecological sense for hu-
mans, other species, the oceans, and the planet — then we really
don't have another choice.

Congress and

Waste Disposal

at Sea

by Thomas R. Kitsos and Joan M. Bondareff

ince the early 1970s, Congress has played a major role in
developing and implementing U.S. policy on waste
disposal at sea. Although Congress has occasionally
reacted to initiatives from the Executive Branch, more
often than not policy has been molded by strong pres-
sures from coastal residents. Legislation often has been passed
despite substantial scientific uncertainty.

In our democratic system of government, when the public
demands environmental protection and the scientific community
fails to speak with one voice, Congress generally reacts by passing
legislation to afford that protection. This has been the case with
disposal of wastes at sea.

Congress turned its full attention to the issue of waste disposal
at sea in 1972, after decades of ocean dumping. Congress first
regulated ocean disposal of wastes when it passed the Marine
Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act (commonly called the
Ocean Dumping Act). That legislation regulated the dumping of
all types of materials into ocean waters and prevented or strictly
limited the dumping of any material that would adversely affect
human health, welfare, the marine environment, ecosystems, or
economic potentialities.

Under the Ocean Dumping Act, disposal was prohibited unless
the dumper obtained a permit from the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) and could demonstrate that the materials to be
dumped would not "unreasonably degrade or endanger human
health or the marine environment." Certain materials, such as
radiological, chemical, and biological warfare agents and high-level
radioactive wastes were fully banned. The dumping of dredged
materials from navigable waters was put under the regulation of
the Army Corps of Engineers (see page 63).

The Ocean Dumping Act had its origins in a 1970 report issued
by the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which Congress

Thomas R. Kitsos
is Senior Pro-
fessional Staff
for the House
Merchant Marine
and Fisheries
Committee of the
U.S. Congress.
Joan M. Bondareff
is Counsel to the
Merchant Marine
and Fisheries
Committee. They
both worked on
the development
and passage of
the Ocean
Dumping Act.

had recently established. The report, entitled Ocean Dumping—
A National Policy, called for the development of a national and
international policy on ocean dumping. The CEQ report also called
for ocean dumping of undigested sewage sludge to be stopped
immediately and the dumping of treated sewage sludge to be
phased out.

The law was enacted during a time when the nation was
undergoing a significant rise in environmental consciousness.
There was an explosion of environmental legislation and "dead
sea" stories began to appear in some newspapers in the Northeast.

The most controversial question facing Congress was the
dumping of sewage sludge at sea. Sewage sludge is a by-product
of the municipal wastewater treatment process and is permitted to

Tugboat pushes
municipal garbage

to New York's
Greatkills landfill.

be dumped under the 1972 Act, provided it meets environmental
standards.

According to a 1987 report by the U.S. Congress Office of
Technology Assessment (OTA) entitled Wastes in Marine Environ-
ments, the amount of sludge dumped in marine waters has
increased steadily, from more than 2.5 million wet tonnes in 1959
to about 7.5 million wet tonnes in 1983. The amount of sludge
dumped today in the ocean is close to 9 million wet tonnes.

A series of pollution incidents in 1976 forced Congress to take

PARK CLOSED
AT DARK

BEACH

CLOSED

HEALTH HAZARD

another look at the ocean dumping of municipal sludge and
industrial waste. That summer, large quantities of foul materials
washed up on the beaches of Long Island, New York, causing many
of that area's largest public beaches to be closed to swimmers.
There also was a major fish kill off the East Coast from Long Island
to Delaware.

In 1977, as a result of beach closures and fish kills, Congress
passed new amendments to the Ocean Dumping Act
specifically addressing sludge and industrial waste. The
amendments called for an end to
ocean dumping of sewage sludge
and industrial waste as soon as
possible, with no permits to be
granted after December 31, 1981.
The type of sludge and industrial
waste prohibited after 1981 was
that which would "unreasonably
degrade" or endanger human
health or the marine
environment. In January of 1977,
the EPA issued final regulations
stating its intention to stop
issuing permits by the end of
1981.

Following the enactment of
the 1977 amendments, more than
150 municipalities, including the
City of Philadelphia, ended their
practice of ocean dumping of

municipal sludge, turned to landfilling, and met the 1981 deadline.
But New York City, a major user of the ocean for sludge disposal,
and several New Jersey municipalities believed they had no
economically viable alternative.

In 1980, New York City challenged EPA's decision not to renew
the city's ocean dumping permit on the grounds that the
decision was inconsistent with the intent of the 1977 amend-
ments. New York City argued that the 1977 amendments did not
prohibit all dumping of sewage sludge, but only that which would,
in the language of the amendments, "unreasonably degrade" the
marine environment.

The Federal Court for the Southern District of New York
agreed with the city. In a 1981 opinion, the court ruled that EPA
had been arbitrary in presuming that the city's sludge did not
meet the act's environmental standards. New York City, Nassau
County, Westchester County, New York, and six New Jersey
municipalities were allowed to continue dumping their sludge in
the ocean pursuant to court order.

A sign of the times in
New Jersey.

The sight of needles
and other medical

debris on beaches in

the late 1980s

contributed to

public concern.

Although ocean dumping of sewage sludge continued after the
1977 amendments, EPA moved the site for the dumping from the
New York Bight Apex, called the 12-mile site, to a new location
some 115 nautical miles east of Atlantic City, New Jersey. This
site, on the edge of the continental shelf, is called the 106-Mile
Dump Site.

Congress codified EPA's administrative decision to move the
dump site to deeper waters in the Water Resources Devel-
opment Act of 1986. This act required all dumpers to move
their operations to the 106 site by December 31, 1987. It also pro-
hibited any new dumpers from using the site. All dumpers met
the deadline for moving their operations, although it meant, in
New York City's case, the acquisition of larger barges for trans-
porting the sludge to the new site.

The summer of 1987 was
another bad summer for U.S.
coastal communities. Public
beaches in numerous New Jersey
townships were closed as a result
of medical debris washing ashore,
high bacteria counts in the water,
and sewage plant overflows. The
public was particularly aghast at
the sight of needles on public
beaches, and naturally concerned
about the risk of contracting
contagious diseases. The effect on
the New Jersey tourist economy
was disastrous, the lost business
estimated to be in the billions of
dollars. The public also witnessed
and mourned an unusually high
number of dolphins dying and
washing up along the Atlantic
coast.

Although the dolphin deaths were subsequently attributed to
a naturally occurring toxin, the possibility that the incidents were
exacerbated by high levels of contaminants in the animals could not
be ruled out. In addition, fishermen near the 106 site reported shell
diseases in fish, which they attributed to the dumping of sludge at
the site. The clamor for Congress to do something was deafening.

As a result, Congress again re-examined the Ocean Dumping
Act. This time, in the Ocean Dumping Ban Act of 1988,
Congress made clear what had not been clear in the 1977
amendments — all ocean dumping of sewage sludge and industrial
waste, whether or not it unreasonably degraded the marine
environment, would cease after December 31, 1991.

•'

Moreover, all dumpers would have to enter into enforceable
agreements with EPA in which they had to commit to specific
schedules to phase out ocean dumping of sewage sludge or face
stiff penalties. By the time of the enactment of the 1988 amend-
ments, the remaining industrial waste dumpers had agreed to stop
using the ocean.

The penalties start at $600 a ton for any sludge dumped after
the 1991 deadline, and escalate incrementally in each sub-
sequent year. The penalties are not strictly punitive; dump-
ers will be allowed to retain a certain percentage of the penalties if
they dedicate the money to developing land-based alternatives.
New Jersey plans to landfill its sludge to meet the deadline
and, in the long
term, to construct
incinerators to
burn dewatered
sludge. New
York City, which
dumps close to
5.3 million wet
tonnes of sludge
a year at the 106
site, has agreed to
phase out ocean
dumping of 20
percent of its
sludge by the
1991 deadline,
with the re-
mainder by June
30, 1992 (subject

to the payment of civil penalties). The city is studying all possible
options for long-term management of the sludge. The design of
eight dewatering facilities is now under way.

Although it will soon be illegal to dump sludge and in-
dustrial waste in the ocean, we are continuing to use the
ocean as a disposal medium for dredged materials.
According to the OTA report, an annual average of about 180
million wet tonnes of dredged material is disposed of in the marine
environment: about two-thirds in estuaries, one-sixth in coastal
waters, and one-sixth in the open ocean.

There is growing public concern about the presence of con-
taminated sediments in the materials dredged from ports and
harbors. The sediments are contaminated by metals and organic
chemicals that settle as a result of industrial discharges and runoff
of pollutants. Congress is beginning to examine the issue of
contaminated sediments to determine if additional controls on their
ocean disposal are required.

The Greenpeace slogan
on the infamous NYC

"garbage barge"

reflects public concern

over ocean dumping.

The barge was rejected

by a number of

countries in Central

America and the

Caribbean.

The views
expressed in this
article are solely
those of the
authors, and do not
necessarily reflect
the views of the
members of the
U.S. House of
Representatives
Merchant Marine
and Fisheries
Committee.

In the area of environmental protection, there has been no
clear consensus among marine scientists about what caused past
pollution incidents or, if there is, it has not been effectively com-
municated to Congress. What is clear is that the capacity of the
oceans to absorb waste materials is a matter of continuing debate
among oceanographers, with no apparent resolution in sight.

Given this debate, a cautious and responsible legislative
response is to ban the activity until sufficient information becomes
available. We have seen this approach in recent congressional
reactions to offshore oil and gas development, ocean incineration,
and the dumping of sludge and industrial waste at sea.

For now, Congress has established a clear policy prohibiting
the ocean disposal of sewage sludge, industrial waste, high-level
radioactive waste, chemical and biological warfare agents, and the
ocean incineration of toxic materials. Opening up the debate about
changing this policy will not be easy.

Yet, Congress is a dynamic institution, affected by new
technological developments, advances in science, and hard data
about risks and benefits. No policy debate is closed forever.
Increased restrictions on landfills will create its own environmental
cost-benefit calculations that could, someday, require a revisiting of
this established policy.

Call For Papers
The Sixth International Conference

on
Solid Waste Management and Secondary Materials

will be held in Philadelphia on 4 - 7 December 1990

Papers related to all aspects of solid waste management and recycling/recovery of secondary
materials are of interest. Papers concerning the following are encouraged:

• Solid Waste Management Models

• Financing and Economic Development

• Market Development

• Technology

A one-page abstract (in English), to be received no later than June 1, 1990 (authors will be
notified after June 15, 1990), should be sent to the following address:

Ronald L. Mersky, Program Chairman
Department of Civil Engineering

Widener University
Chester, PA 19013-5972 U.S.A.

Telephone: 215-499-4042 FAX: 215-876-9751

A Brief History
of Ocean Disposal

by Iver W. Duedall

uring the last 20 years, the open ocean has
come under increasing pressure from waste
disposal. Meanwhile, the coastal ocean con-
tinues to receive greater amounts of contami-
nants from outfalls and land runoff. Because water and
marine life have no sense of political boundaries, inter-
national organizations play a vital role in providing
discussion, regulation, and policy on what society
disposes of in the ocean.

Historically, most coastal countries used the sea for
waste disposal. It was generally the most economic way
to manage the waste, since land usually had, and still
has, a high price tag while the sea has no private owner
in the normal sense. In addition, dilution processes
served the illusion that dumping at sea does not cause
any permanent damage. So why risk contaminating
land or drinking water with wastes if the sea is close by?

Iver W. Duedall is
Professor of Ocean-
ography and Ocean
Engineering at
Florida Institute of
Technology (FIT),
Melbourne, Florida.
He is Board Chair-
man for the Re-
search Center for
Waste Utilization at
FIT, and co-editor
of the six -volume
Oceanic Processes
in Marine Pollution,
published by
Krieger.

Dredged-material i

/ \ *'

(•), scwngc-
sludvc ( ), and

( + ), and regions
of drilling-fluid
e (sJmdcd
areas).

Drilling Activity

Slight

Moderate

Heavy

One disposal option

for liquid organic

wastes is to burn them

at sea in specially

designed ships.

For some countries, the systematic disposal of wastes into the
ocean has a long and fairly well-documented history. Until very
recently, the New York metropolitan region always considered the
ocean as disposal grounds for much of its sewage sludges, dredged
material, garbage, demolition material, and street sweepings. For
decades, Britain disposed of sewage sludges and coal wastes,
including colliery waste-shale and power plant fly ash, at sea.

The most common form of ocean dumping today is disposal
from ships or barges, but specially constructed incineration vessels
also burn liquid organic wastes such as PCBs and other organo-
halogens. The list of wastes dumped at sea is very long, and is
topped by dredged material, industrial waste (usually acid-iron
and alkaline waste, scrap metal, fish by-products, coal ash, and

flue-gas desulfurization sludges), and
sewage sludge.

Worldwide concern about effects of
ocean dumping did not exist prior to 1960.
Earlier environmental interest focused on
the pollution of streams, rivers, lakes, and
estuaries from outfalls and land-based
emissions such as industrial waste, agricul-
tural runoff, and, in general, very careless
waste management practices.

In 1967, interest in protecting the ocean
from chemical pollution, industrial and
transportation disasters, and ocean dumping
began to climb after the Torrey Canyon oil
spill off the Cornish coast. According to
Douglas M. Johnston, editor of the 1981 book
The Environmental Law of the Sea, this disaster sparked a number of
international meetings dealing with basic issues of ocean pollution,
including the need to develop policy, regulation, and an interna-
tional infrastructure to deal with ocean dumping, exclusive of such
manmade disasters as oil spills.

In the United States, the evolution of ocean dumping regula-
tion, policy, and research took a huge jump forward in 1970, when
the Council on Environmental Quality published its landmark
report (see page 23). This was the first concerted scientific effort to
determine the fate and effects of wastes dumped at sea; and had the
report not been published, it was likely that U.S. ocean dumping
would have increased. However, in the 20 years since the report,
we have seen changes in federal legislation and policy leading to
the cessation of several ocean dumpsites, comprehensive scientific
research on the fates and effects of waste dumped at sea, and
heightened public interest due to well-publicized beach closings.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) presently has
designated about 109 ocean dumpsites that fall into two categories:
interim and noninterim. The 46 interim sites received their desig-

PHYSICAL

• Diffusion

• Advection

• Sedimentation

Thermocl i ne\i-/''.' • V:':- '

CHEMICAL

• Volatilization • Adsorption

• Neutralization • Desorption

• Precipitation • Dissolution

• Flocculation • Oxidation

• Reduction

BIOLOGICAL
• Toxicity response

• Stimulation response

• Incorporation/accumulation

• Degradation

BENTHIC

• Geochemical

• Biological

esses will affect the

distribution and fate of

waste in the water

column.

nations on the basis of historical usage. While EPA reviews of the Many physical proc-

'11 f f i t 7

63 noninterim sites are yet to be completed, the agency has found
that the sites meet ocean-dumpsite regulations and criteria.
Ninety-five percent of the sites are used for the disposal of dredged
material (see page 63).

In June, 1971, the Inter-Governmental Working Group on
Marine Pollution (IWGMP, established by the UN Conference on
the Human Environment) met in London and expressed the need
for an international agreement to regulate dumping at sea. The
U.S. delegation submitted a draft of a document known as the
"Convention for Regulation of Transportation for Ocean Dump-
ing." The IWGMP encouraged member states of the United
Nations to give written opinions, and that November held a second
meeting in Ottawa, Canada.

Several of the draft articles on ocean dumping were accepted
at this second meeting. The draft was subjected to further re-
visions at an April, 1972, meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland; at
two meetings held later in the year in Britain; and at the 1972 Con-
ference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, Sweden.
Through this process, the revised draft became the London Dump-
ing Convention (LDC), which entered into force on 30 August 1975.
As of 25 December 1989, 64 countries, the so-called "contracting
states," ratified or acceded to the LDC. Areas under the conven-
tion's jurisdiction include both territorial seas and high seas. These

areas are further defined to include all marine waters except
internal waters of contracting states.
The LDC defines ocean dumping as:

• Any deliberate disposal at sea of wastes or other matter from vessels,

aircraft, platforms or other manmade structures at sea.

• Any deliberate disposal at sea of vessels, aircraft, platforms or other

manmade structures at sea.

The at-sea discharge of primary, secondary, and tertiary treated
sewage effluent (and sewage sludge off the southern California
coast) from outfalls is not considered ocean dumping; nor is the
disposal of incidental material such as sea- or freshwater used in
the operation of vessels, aircraft, and platforms or other structures.

Primary &
Primary Treatment Secondary Treatment Secondary Ocean

Primary
Settling Tank

Aeration Tank

Secondary :
Settling Tank :

Disinfection
Tank

Municipal effluent

and sludge go

through varying

stages of treatment

before they are reused

or disposed.

At-sea discharge of mining and smelting wastes from exploration,
exploitation, and associated offshore processing of seabed minerals
is similarly not considered ocean dumping.

The LDC uses the black-list/grey-list format for categorizing
substances for permit purposes. Annex I of the LDC defines black-
list substances while Annex II defines grey-list substances (see
pages 34 and 35). Dumping of black-list substances is prohibited.
Industries affected by the ban include pesticide, chemical, and rope
manufacturing; electroplating; and domestic and military nuclear.

The grey-list substances also are produced and /or used by an array
of industries, and can be dumped only after obtaining a special per-
mit. Dumping of all other substances requires a general permit
from the appropriate federal administrative organization within
the contracting state.

Accurate worldwide records on the amounts of wastes dis-
posed at sea prior to 1976 are virtually impossible to ob-
tain. However, as a result of the international activities
leading to conventions or agreements, information is becoming
available on the
number of ocean
dumping permits
issued by many
countries, dumpsite
locations, and the
kinds and quantities
of wastes dumped.
Worldwide, the
national authorities
of the contracting
states annually issue
a total of about 50
permits for the ocean
disposal of sewage
sludge, 150 for in-
dustrial wastes, 380
for dredged material,
and 50 for other mat-
erials— such as ships,
low-level nuclear
wastes, and the incin-
eration of chlorinated
hydrocarbons.

LDC policy on ocean dumping is similar to that of such other
regional agreements as the Barcelona, Helsinki, and Oslo
conventions. The Barcelona and Helsinki conventions
prohibit the disposal of all forms of nuclear waste, organosilicon
compounds, and acid and alkaline compounds that are not rapidly
rendered harmless by processes occurring at sea. Other organiza-
tions that address this issue include the Bonn Agreement, the
Kuwait Final Act, the Paris Commission, UN Environment Pro-
gram's (UNEP) Regional Seas Program, and the Joint Group of
Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Pollution.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO, previously
called the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organiza-
tion) provides the administrative mechanism for cooperation
among the LDC's contracting states. The IMO's Marine Environ-
mental Division, located in London, collects and disseminates infor-

(continued on page 36)

300-

~) r r\ _

• Industrial Wastes
n Sewage Sludge
n Dredged Material

2o(J

— i

<s> 20
0
<4_

— i

J£ 1 M)

\ uu

j(J

u ^

1 976 ' 1 977 ' 1 978 ' 1 979 ' 1 980 ' 1 981 ' 1 982 ' 1 983 ' 1 984 ' 1 985 '

Comparison of quanti-
ties of sewage sludge,
industrial wastes, and
dredged material
permitted for ocean
disposal by the London
Dumping Convention.
"The reader should be
warned against over-
interpretation of
the data which for
several reasons must
be considered
approximate."

Substances controlled by the

Black list: Annex I

1 . Organohalogen compounds

2. Mercury and mercury com-
pounds

3. Cadmium and cadmium
compounds

4. Persistent plastics and other
persistent synthetic materials, for
example, netting and ropes, which may
float or may remain in suspension in
the sea in such a manner as to interfere
materially with fishing, navigation, or
other legitimate uses of the sea.

5. Crude oil, fuel oil, heavy diesel
oil, lubricating oils, hydraulic fluids,
and mixtures containing any of these,
taken on board for the purpose of
dumping.

6. High-level radioactive wastes or
other high-level radioactive matter,
defined on public health, biological, or
other grounds, by the competent
international body in this field, at
present the International Atomic
Energy Agency, as unsuitable for
dumping at sea.

7. Materials in whatever form
(such as solids, liquids, semi-liquids,
gases, or in a living state) produced for
biological and chemical warfare.

8. The preceding paragraphs of this
annex do not apply to substances which
are rapidly rendered harmless by
physical, chemical, or biological
processes in the sea provided they do
not: (i) make edible marine organisms
unpalatable, or (ii) endanger human
health or that of domestic animals.

The consultative procedure provided
for under Article XIV should be
followed by a Party if there is doubt
about the harmlessness of the sub-
stance.

9. This Annex does not apply to
wastes or other materials (such as
sewage sludges and dredged spoils)
containing the matters referred to in
paragraphs 1 to 5 above as trace
contaminants. Such wastes shall be
subject to the provisions of Annexes II
and III as appropriate.

10. Paragraphs 1 and 5 of the
Annex do not apply to the disposal of
wastes or other matter referred to in
these paragraphs by means of incinera-
tion at sea. Incineration of such wastes
or other matter at sea requires a prior
special permit. In the issue of special
permits for incineration the Contract-
ing Parties shall apply the Regulations
for the Control of Incineration of
Wastes and Other Matter at Sea set
forth in the Addendum to this Annex
(which shall constitute an integral part
of this Annex) and take full account of
the Technical Guidelines on the
Control of Incineration of Wastes and
Other Matter at Sea adopted by the
Contracting Parties in consultation.

London Dumping Convention

Grey list: Annex II

The following substances
and materials require special
permits, issued only according
to the articles of the LDC.

A. Wastes containing
significant amounts of the
matters listed below:

arsenic, lead, copper, zinc,
and their compounds

organosilicon compounds

cyanides

fluorides

pesticides and their by-
products not covered
in Annex I

B. In the issue of permits
for the dumping of large
quantities of acids and alkalis,
consideration shall be given to
the possible presence in such
wastes of the substances listed
in paragraph A, and to beryl-
lium, chromium, nickel, van-
adium, and their compounds.

C. Containers, scrap
metal, and other bulky wastes
liable to sink to the sea bottom
which may present a serious
obstacle to fishing or na-
vigation.

D. Radioactive wastes or other
radioactive matter not included in
Annex I. In the issue of permits for
the dumping of this matter, the
contracting parties should take full
account of the recommendations of
the competent international body in
this field, at present the Interna-
tional Atomic Energy Agency.

E. In the issue of special
permits for the incineration of
substances and materials listed in
this Annex, the Contracting
Parties shall apply the Regulations
for the Control of Incineration of
Wastes and Other Matter at Sea set
forth in the addendum to Annex I
and take full account of the
Technical Guidelines on the
Control of Incineration of Wastes
and Other Matter at Sea adopted
by the Contracting Parties in con-
sultation, to the extent specified in
these Regulations and Guidelines.

(From the Final Act of the LDC, Office of the London Dumping Conven-
tion, International Maritime Organization, London)

"If past

ocean-dumping

practices

are any

indication,

ocean dumping

is bound
to continue."

mation through the Office of the LDC on all aspects of dumping at
sea by contracting states. The division also convenes the annual
LDC consultative and scientific meetings.

Delegations from the contracting parties and observers from
noncontracting parties, UN organizations, and various
intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations
attend the consultative meetings. For example, in 1989 at the 12th
Consultative Meeting of the Contracting Parties to the LDC, repre-
sentatives of Barbados, Cyprus, Egypt, and Liberia attended as
noncontracting observers. Intergovernmental organizations were
represented by such groups as UNEP, the Intergovernmental
Oceanographic Commission, and the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development's Nuclear Energy Agency. Non-
governmental organizations that sent observers included the
International Association of Ports and Harbors, Friends of the Earth
International, the World Conservation Union, and the Oil Industry
International Exploration and Production Forum.

The LDC Scientific Group on Dumping meets annually, but not
at the same time as the consultative group, and attracts similar
observers. Items discussed at the April, 1989, meeting included
reports on annexes, field verification of laboratory tests, monitoring
and control of dumping and incineration at sea, disposal of off-
shore structures, processes and procedures for managing wastes
dumped at sea, and cooperation and information exchange.

The large number of organizations attending both the consul-
tative and scientific meetings of the LDC demonstrate the
strong international interest in issues of ocean dumping.
The meetings provide the inter- and nongovernmental organiza-
tions with opportunities to present their points of view.

If past ocean-dumping practices are any indication, ocean
dumping is bound to continue. Countries continue to use the sea
for the disposal of wastes, although North Sea countries intend to
halt all at-sea dumping except for dredged material. Interest in the
health of the sea is now a worldwide issue and therefore each
ocean-dumping proposal should be considered cautiously.

The volume of dredged material for disposal has been steadily
increasing and probably will continue to do so. While the disposal
of industrial waste seems to be declining, this may be temporary as
companies that used the sea for waste disposal make adjustments,
such as relocating to regions where public or legal opposition to
ocean dumping does not exist. For sewage sludge, only two
countries, the United States and Britain, dump large quantities of
sludge into the ocean, although the United States plans to end at-
sea sludge disposal by the end of 1991 and Britain will phase it out
by 1998. Britain also will end at-sea dumping of industrial waste as
soon as 1992, but no later than 1993.

As the ocean receives less of the "traditional" forms of waste,

new forms appear for consideration. There is the problem of de-
commissioned offshore platforms and structures: should they be
disposed of at sea or not? The 12th consultative meeting of the
LDC discussed whether toppling such structures and redesignating
them as artificial reefs is really "dumping." The meeting also heard
discussions on the possible ocean disposal of decommissioned
nuclear submarines, and proposals for restructuring the annexes.

Most countries that use the sea for waste disposal are indus-
trialized and enjoy a high standard of living. Developing
countries will likely take a more active interest in ocean
dumping as they industrialize and improve land-based sanitation
and waste management.

These issues will be best faced by international organizations,
such as the LDC, which can provide information on alternatives to
dumping, and the expected fate and effects of the wastes in the
ocean, through either its own organization or the contracting states.
In this regard, the eighth consultative meeting of the LDC received
an important report from "Task Team 2000," the LDC's policy-
planning group, that identified nine feasible mitigative measures
(see page 38) that could protect the marine environment.

The impact of international scientific and political activities on
ocean dumping during the 15 to 20 years since publication of the

Marine Science And Policy

SPECIAL OFFER - SAVE 55%

All six volumes of

OCEANIC PROCESSES
IN MARINE POLLUTION

edited by Iver W. Duedall, Dana Kester
& P. Kilho Park

Vol. 1 Biological Processes and Wastes in the Ocean

Vol. 2 Physicochemical Processes of Wastes in the Ocean

Vol. 3 Marine Waste Management: Science and Policy

Vol. 4 Scientific Monitoring Strategies for Ocean Waste Disposal

Vol. 5 Urban Wastes in Coastal Marine Environments

Vol. 6 Physical and Chemical Processes: Transport
and Transformation

When ordering, please add $8.00 for all books to cover shipping charges. (For books
sold separately, add $4.00, $2.00 for each additional)

KRIEGER PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC.

P.O. Box 9542 • Melbourne, Florida 32902-9542
(407)724-9542 • Dkect Order Line (407)727-7270

Measures for reducing

environmental pressures

on the ocean

• Wherever possible recycle and reuse waste products.

• Treat wastes that cannot be recycled or reused at the source to the
extent feasible.

• Use pesticides and fertilizers in such a fashion that they do not enter
the marine environment.

• Use sea disposal, whether by outfall or by dumping, only for those
materials that are compatible with the marine environment.

• Use locations for sea disposal of wastes that will not interfere with
other uses of the sea.

• Use waste disposal practices at sea that minimize local impacts at the
point of disposal.

• Carefully evaluate the potential environmental impacts of new devel-
opments and seek to mitigate adverse impacts.

• Monitor the health of the oceans on a continuing worldwide basis.

• Manage the use of the resources of the sea so as to prevent depletion of
resources on a worldwide basis.

(From the Office of the London Dumping Convention, International
Maritime Organization, London.)

Council on Environmental Quality report and formation of the
LDC has been rapid and productive. Some industries are using
cleaner technologies and some countries are either taking a precau-
tionary view on ocean dumping, or eliminating it altogether. Such
steps could lead to a more optimistic prediction that the oceans will
become cleaner. However, ocean outfalls, nonpoint sources, catas-
trophic oil spills, and, in general, overuse and exploitation of
coastal regions are major threats still to be reckoned with.

Acknowledgments

I am very thankful to Manfred Nauke and John Karau for their continued
help over the years in providing information on activities of the LDC, and
for reading and making comments on this report; I am also very thankful
to Annette Bernard for her help in typing the manuscript.

Effects of Wastes

on the Ocean:

The Coastal

Example

by Judith E. McDowell Capuzzo

xtending from the shore to the edge of the
continental shelf, the coastal ocean is one
of the most productive ecosystems in the
world. Coastal areas provide 50 percent
of the world's fisheries harvests, and are the breeding
and nursery grounds of many commercially important
species.

Dumping acid-iron wastes in coastal waters, as practiced in the New York Bight in the early 1980s,
is no longer allowed in the United States. However, it still goes on elsewhere in the world.

As our population grows, demands on coastal resources increase.
Uncontrolled waste disposal in coastal areas degrades the waters, and
compromises fishing and mariculture. Studying effects of waste
already disposed in coastal areas can help us formulate environmen-
tally sound plans for ocean waste disposal, and pinpoint critically
needed research.

The coastal ocean receives a wide range of contaminants from
society's refuse, including discharges from industrial and
municipal wastes, dredged material, atmospheric fallout,
and polluted rivers. Environmental concern for ocean dumping of
sewage sludge and medical wastes has dominated news headlines
and environmental legislation in recent years.

In reality, contamination from sewage sludge is only a small
fraction of all pollution entering coastal waters. Sewage and indus-
trial effluents, land runoff, and
dredged materials are larger

sources of such persistent and

FEDERAL s^p£RFUNI dangerous chemicals as poly-

H AZ ARDOuS WASTE chlorinated biphenyls and

INVESTIGATION SITE

A HEALTH ADVISORY concerning the consump- page 54).

tion of CRABS, FISH, and WATER FOWL taken in The distribution, fate, and

New York State has been issued by the New York ff fe f contamiriants in coastal

State Department of Health due to the uptake of

various contaminants. marine environments are gov-

This AREA is known to be contaminated with erned by natural processes that

CADMIUM and NICKEL. influence their persistence in the

For further information call: , . ., ,.,..

ocean and their availability to

• Putnam County Dept. of Health 914-225-3641

• N.Y.S Dept. of Environme^jkx>nservation 518-457-9538 marine animals. Organisms may

accumulate contaminants from
their food or absorb them from
the surrounding water or sedi-
ment. Over time, certain chemicals build up within an animal — a
process called bioaccumulation. If this animal is eaten by another,
then the chemical can be passed up the food chain.

any biologically harmful contaminants bind to floating
particles, and then settle into the sediment. There are
numerous examples of sediment deposits in coastal areas
that reflect waste disposal histories. In Massachusetts, for example,
high levels of PCBs in New Bedford Harbor and PAHs in Boston
Harbor come from decades of local waste production and disposal.
The principal strategies for ocean disposal are containment and
dispersal. Containment is not feasible for the disposal of large
volumes of waste. Exceptions to this rule are extremely hazardous
refuse, such as high-level radioactive waste, that may be contained
before disposal, and dredged materials that can be dropped into a
submarine pit and then capped. As for dispersal, the ocean offers
some natural mechanisms: strong bottom currents pick up and

transport materials, which are
broken down and recycled in
biogeochemical cycles.

But the ocean varies, and
some areas have stronger or
more consistent currents than
others. Studies show that in
coastal dumpsites with low
dispersion, sewage sludge can
cause high levels of organic
enrichment. This can have
negative impacts on benthic, or
bottom-dwelling, communities:
oxygen levels drop and there is
reduced diversity of animals.
On the other hand, there have
been no apparent changes in
benthic communities at highly
dispersive dumpsites. These
differences suggest that disper-
sal may not only be the easiest
disposal option, but also the
best.

But organic enrichment is
only one of many major con-
cerns. Two others are uptake
and accumulation of pathogens
or toxic contaminants in re-
sources destined for people's

dinner tables, and toxic effects on the survival and reproduction of
marine organisms — effects that lead to adverse impacts on marine
ecosystems. To minimize these risks, wastes should be placed
where strong horizontal dispersion will spread materials far and
wide.

As toxic chemicals make their way through marine food
chains, they may lead to specific ecological changes at each
trophic level, or result in tainted seafood. Some of the most
dangerous contaminants are metals, halogenated hydrocarbons,
and other organic compounds including petroleum hydrocarbons
from accidental oil spills, municipal discharges, and urban runoff.
These contaminants are linked to human health effects.

Ecological concerns include changes in species distributions
and abundance, habitats, and biogeochemical cycles. Commer-
cially important species or populations might diminish because of
reproductive or developmental failure, habitat destruction, or new
interactions with other species.

Habitat alteration and its impact on fisheries is becoming an
extremely important ecological issue. The impact of any particular

Runoff from

agricultural lands can

carry pesticides and

other pollutants into

estuaries and coastal

waters.

Chemical

contamination

of coastal

waters

has put

commercial

and

recreational

fisheries

at risk.

contaminant depends largely on its concentration and transport.
The most serious ecological and human health concerns are limited
to localized areas where decades of disposal have caused high
levels of contamination.

An example of long-term localized pollution is illustrated in
a recent chemical analysis of fish and shellfish from New
England. The study covered data spanning 25 years and
was commissioned by the Coast Alliance, a consortium of environ-
mental advocacy groups. My colleagues and I collected data sets
from various regions and species. The worst cases were found in
urban harbors. Fish and shellfish from these coastal areas were
highly contaminated.

If urban discharges continue unabated, even clean, remote
areas could become contaminated. However, when the use or
production of a toxin has been controlled (as with the insecticide,
DDT, which was banned in the late 1960s) contaminant levels
decline over time. With highly persistent compounds like PCBs,
this reduction may take many years.

Chemical contamination has recently led to several fishery
closures along the U.S. coasts. For example, in 1979, the Common-
wealth of Massachusetts closed approximately 72 square kilometers
of Buzzards Bay to finfishing and shellfishing because of PCB
contamination; in the early 1980s, the State of California developed
health advisories warning the public against frequent consumption
of fish caught off Southern California; in 1986, the states of New
York and Rhode Island closed their commercial and recreational
striped bass fisheries as a result of PCB contamination; and in 1988,
the Massachusetts Department of Public Health warned against
eating tomalley (the gooey but tasty green organ known to biolo-
gists as the "hepatopancreas") of lobsters from Quincy Bay. These
actions illustrate a growing concern for the impact of chemical
contamination on resources in coastal waters.

Defining the risk of food-chain contamination requires an
understanding of potential transfer routes to the human
consumer. Contaminants that can cause mutations, cancer,
or other ill-health effects in humans are of particular concern.
These include chlorinated hydrocarbons, petroleum hydrocarbons,
and heavy metals such as mercury, lead, and cadmium.

Exposure standards for human health exist for only a few
contaminants, such as PCBs, mercury, and DDT. There is consider-
able variation in policy recommendations from different agencies
regarding seafood safety issues.

Policy inconsistencies result from different methods of analysis
and risk assessment, and in the inherent assumptions used in
establishing ostensibly safe limits. In such pollution studies as
those conducted in Quincy Bay, recommendations regarding
seafood consumption issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection

Waste
Characteristics

Site
Characteristics

Engineering

Discharge

System

Disposal
System

Engineering Design

Processes:

Physical

Chemical

Biological

Predictions

Model

Concentrations

and Fluxes of

Wastes

in Ocean

Impact Evaluation

Public
Health

Aquatic

Ecosystem

Health

Aesthetics

Impacts

Agency are in direct conflict with recommendations of safe limits
made by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. To alleviate
public concern over the safety of their seafood supply/ state and
federal agencies must coordinate sampling and analytical protocols
as well as risk assessment and regulatory guidance.

How can society use the oceans for waste disposal without
harming the marine environment or fisheries resources?
The first step in developing wise management of ocean-
disposal policy is to control more tightly the production and utiliza-
tion of toxic chemicals, and reduce their amounts in wastes. To
handle the unavoidable waste that remains, ocean disposal system
designs should incorporate the currents and dispersive characteris-
tics of the receiving waters. Offshore waste disposal has several ad-
vantages over nearshore disposal: greater dilution and dispersion,
and a reduced chance for the contaminants to reach humans
through the food chain.

To evaluate the environmental impacts of waste discharges
requires an understanding of how contaminants are distributed
over space and time; in which parts of the ecosystem they collect
(for example, sediment or organisms); and the damage caused by
toxic accumulation. Thus, we need to develop impact assessment
methods that couple an understanding of contaminant distribution
and the mechanisms of toxic action.

To understand long-term impacts of waste disposal in the
oceans, many questions need answering: How long will contami-
nants persist in the marine environment? What is the uptake by
commercially important fish and shellfish? What are the sublethal
effects on marine organisms?

Engineering design
and environmental
objectives of waste

disposal. (U.S.
Natural Resources

Council 1984)

To answer such questions, we also need to know:

• the physical processes — specifically, currents — that influence
contaminant distribution;

• the chemical processes that influence availability, persistence, and
degradation of these materials in sediments and water; and

• the long-term biological effects that alter the stability of animal
populations and the consequences of those effects on recreational and
commercial fisheries.

The first two aspects are important for establishing realistic
exposure scenarios — in time and space — and the third is important
for linking ecological effects to the contamination of resources.

But these questions cannot be answered by scientists in any
one field. Ecologists, toxicologists, and oceanographers must all
cooperate to develop "the big picture." It is only through multidis-
ciplinary studies that we will come to understand the causal
relationship between pollution and coastal degradation, or develop
predictive approaches to environmental monitoring.

The oceans may continue to provide a disposal option for
society's wastes, but only if sites are properly selected, managed,
and monitored. As we approach the 21st century, it is essential
that scientists, environmental managers, policymakers, engineers,
and legislators work together to develop environmentally sound
waste-disposal options. *-**

Judith E. McDowell Capuzzo is a Senior Scientist in the Biology
Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Mid 1980s

Cartoon reflecting the
public interest in using the
deep ocean for waste
disposal, and focusing on
the perceived general lack of
interest in the deep ocean.

"/ don't kno-.L uh\ 1 don't care about the botto
of the ocran, but I don't."

Editorial Cartoons
and Public
Perception

by Michael A. Champ

he pollution cartoons reproduced
here demonstrate the power of
illustration to present informa-
tion, ideas, and concepts. Car-
toons contribute an artist's interpretation
of society's beliefs, moods, or knowledge.

Late 1970s

Cartoon that marked
the shift of people's
interest from human-
kind to the ecosystem
and biological effects.

Early 1970s

Cartoon depicting the
sludge monster coming
ashore on Long Island
and New Jersey beaches.

March 1985

These cartoons, spanning 20 years, reflect the public's fear of a
catastrophic degradation of the marine environment. This fear is
thus a reality that policy- and decision-makers must deal with
when developing waste management strategies. Cartoons are a
constant reminder that research cannot be an end unto itself.
Informing the public is at least as important as research itself.

Cartoons also reflect what the public knows, does not know, or
does not want to know. In most cases, a cartoon's purpose is to
educate, enlighten, and stimulate response — be it anger, frustra-
tion, or sad laughter. The cartoon may exaggerate a point for
inherent humor, or truth, or both.

Toons cannot be closely or repetitively examined because they
have only one purpose — to capture 100 percent of our attention
just once. On closer examination, we often wonder why we
laughed, because the point is so simple.

For example, floating dead fish have never been found follow-
ing ocean dumping of acid wastes. Fish swim away from the
waste plume into uncontaminated waters and the acid wastes are
quickly diluted to below acutely toxic (short-term exposure) levels.

However, if the same fish were to stay in the waste stream they
would die in a very short time. A cartoon depicting dead fish

Nf ••(Uy nruon by Tom Dvcy

'Play it safe — tell the other
customers we're out of striped bass'

March 1985

associated with ocean dumping is an extension of these two truths,
and an assumption that two truths make a third. Nevertheless,
such cartoons do represent a public outcry not to let coastal marine
pollution or ocean dumping create vast areas of dead marine life.

There are some world-class environmental editorial cartoonists
today. The illustrations here are from my personal collection of
some 200 cartoons on marine pollution and ocean waste disposal.
Many have been sent to me by friends from all over the English-
speaking world. The ones selected here are my favorites.

Michael A. Champ is President of Environmental Systems Develop-
ment, Inc., in Falls Church, Virginia. He has spent some 20 years
in the waste management field, including senior advisory positions
at the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection
Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"Business was fine until the Trades Description bloke poked his bloomin' nose in. "

June 1987

"It's not my idea of a dip in the briny!"

July 1983

"All my life I dreamed of living on a desert isle, far from all trace of civilization..."

Mav 198-1

"Keep it up, Fred! There's plenty more rubbish coming in with the tide!"

August 1982

October 1986

"Let's get out of here-the canary's dead!'

February 1977

"I'm keen on the environment too — but I like to keep my job and my private life separate'

99§-AP. LeiP Eriksson

r BlackWi 194O: theU'Boat

'• Th^Bismarck

'•THE GARBAGE BARGE

May 1987

AND

Arm BOTTOM OF BOSTON HA'ReoR/TMKiN6 WITH

A60UT ^VlW/ABNTAl CONCERNS,,. '

September 1988

f
t

!
f
!
f

As soon

medical odd? and ends wash
ashore, we"
oper

August 1988

TIME- HA£ COME,
THE WALRUS SA\D,VTO
TALK OP MANY THING'S :

OF SYRlNGrES— AND BLOOD —
AND BODY PART'S —
OF MEDICAL WASTE
THAT CLINGr-S —

AND WHY A BAND- AID
15 ALL I'VE

AND WHETHER COLO5TOMY
HAVE WIN<36."

March 1989

WASHINGTON

Mark Alan Stamaty

HAS its PLACE.

It's OKAV to RELISH F _.

OF PLAYING im. tHE OCEAN
SURFiNG,

"R\D\NG WAVES"

ARTISTS, L'lKE

ANNETTE, HAVE PRESERVED
TUST -AS REMINGTON o/n/jL

RUSSELL immoRtMizED;tlw.

- •"' ^ WEST FOR ^PWPRAtiONS
UNBORN.

qrpne ERA OF

I STAGE COACH
COVERED WAGON IS
A PART OF OUR HlSTORl
to HONOR (md CHERISH

is tHE ERA OF
SEASWORE RECREATION

•p)ut Let us NOT BE

^VICTIMS

OF NOSTALGIA,,CLINGING
-to -tHE PAST,
RESISTING tHE

NATURAL

EVOLUTION
OF OUR .

,-x....iRELOTiONSHlP
<*^i totHESEfV

'N THIS ER(K OF WIPE
PROL\FERNTioN OF

INDOOR

ANO INDOOR
CAN

TRWSCENDTHE

CRUDITIES OF OCEAN

amzL ALLOW pUR GREAT
AQUEOUS FR\END ;'
SERVE USmANE\N

S tHE BIGGEST

CAN
tHE WORLD/ *

ICTpHE FUTURE iS UPON US.
r\ LET US OPEN OUR EYES ',
1^ amxJL OUR HEARTS.

CANHELPUS

I must go down

totheseasaqain,

to the lonely sea
and the scum,

And all Task is
^ 4unr\p truck
a pier to

it from.

August 1988

Detecting the
Biological Effects

of Deep-Sea
Waste Disposal

by John J. Stegeman

John J. Stegeman
is a Senior Scien-
tist and holds the
Watson Chair in
Biochemistry and
Oceanography at
the Woods Hole
Oceanographic
Institution.

aintaining the Earth's habitability and health requires
serious attention to decisions concerning the produc-
tion, use, disposal, and destruction of wastes. Among
those of particular concern are persistent chemicals
that can threaten the health of humans and other
species; some of these chemicals are among the most potent toxi-
cants on Earth. Dangers associated with land disposal of such
chemicals have stimulated interest in other options, including deep-
ocean disposal. Before considering deep-ocean disposal, however,
we must first be able to detect the effects that those wastes have on
deep-sea life.

Tools now available to biologists can detect certain biochemical
changes, sometimes called "biomarkers," that signal an animal's
first response to chemical pollutants. By analyzing biomarkers, we
can assess the biological exposure and effects of pollutants more
specifically and inexpensively than other methods that assess the
presence of the pollutants. Biomarkers have provided the first
direct evidence that some chemicals may already be causing
biological change in the deep ocean, a region far removed from the
known point-sources of those chemicals.

Many of the hazardous chemicals that occur in waste materials
are among the families of compounds known as polynuclear
aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and chlorinated aromatic hydrocar-
bons. The latter family includes the subfamilies of polychlorinated
biphenyls (PCBs), polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs), and
polychlorinated dioxins (PCDDs). These compounds are fat-
soluble and readily taken up by animals; they often concentrate in
liver and flesh.

Proof that chemical

contaminants are

causing a biological

change in deep-sea

fish. Rattail fish (top)

were sampled at two

deep-sea sites, Carson

Canyon off the New-

foundland coast and

Hudson Canyon off

the New York/New

Jersey coast. Protein

samples from rattail

fish at the two sites

were analyzed by the

"Western Blot"
method (below). The
amount of color in the
blots (middle) is pro-
portional to the
amount of protein that

is increased by
chemical contamina-
tion. Lane 1 sample is
from Hudson Canyon,
lane 2 sample is from
Carson Cam/on.

Different types

are separated f 2
from one another
in an electric field.

Different types of cell proteins

occur in a mixture. Most are not visible.

All the proteins,
still not visible,
are transferred
(or blotted) onto
a special paper.

OOO
AAA

AAA

This paper is then treated
with antibodies that bind
only to P450E. The color
tag reveals where binding
has occurred.

Disease
in coastal

fish

as a result

of chemical

contamination

is a matter

of serious

environmental

concern.

Studies of mammals, and to a lesser extent of fish and birds,
show us that PAHs cause cancer and genetic mutations, PCBs
promote tumors and affect reproduction, and PCDDs and PCDFs
adversely affect immune systems and reproduction. All these
compounds also can contribute to the development of cancer.

PAHs and PCBs long have been known as contaminants of
ocean waters and sediments, and dioxins and dibenzofurans
are now turning up similarly. They all arrive from various
sources by a number of routes. The incomplete combustion of
material such as wood, paper, and fossil fuels can form PAHs.
Dioxins can originate in chlorination processes such as pulp bleach-
ing in the paper industry. PCBs are no longer manufactured but
still enter the environment from old sources such as dredged
sediments.

Large volumes of sewage effluents containing household and
industrial waste carry some of the chemicals into coastal waters, as
do rivers bearing waste that was produced inland. These chemicals
also enter the sea by way of precipitation from the atmosphere and
dumping at coastal and offshore sites, such as the 106 site off New
York and New Jersey.

Evidence of disease in coastal fish raises serious concern about
chemical effects on the health of the coastal environment. Re-
searchers are finding cancer in bottom-dwelling fish in an increas-
ing number of urban harbors; these cancers are often in the liver
and often at high prevalence. This is true along both coasts of
North America, in Europe, and even in fish from freshwater sites.
We are searching for specific causes of the fish diseases; chemicals
are suspected. There also are serious questions about the human
health risks, such as cancer, from eating contaminated fish and
shellfish. Epidemiological studies already suggest that human
health may be affected by the consumption of fish that have high
PCB burdens.

Since coastal areas are where both the greatest amount of at-sea
waste disposal occurs and the preponderance of marine
resources are harvested, this is where the matters of public
and environmental health are of most serious concern (see page 39).
Contamination of more remote marine regions should be of less
immediate concern from a public health perspective. But as many
of these chemicals are now present throughout the world's oceans,
we can ask whether they might be contributing to biological change
in more remote marine systems. If so, are the changes adverse?

We and other researchers are evaluating biomarkers as signals
for chemical effects in aquatic species, terrestrial wildlife, and
humans. Using biomarkers to investigate the deep-sea environ-
ment could provide the essential background information for
monitoring the effects of wastes that might be disposed of in the
deep ocean.

Establishing cause-and-effect relationships between chemicals
and cancer or other health effects is extremely difficult. Field
studies usually reveal only casual associations. Laboratory studies
linking specific biological changes to specific chemicals require de-
tailed knowledge of the basic biology and biochemistry of the
species of concern, and knowledge of the exact processes involved
when the chemical in question interacts with living systems. De-
tailed study of such chemical-biological interactions requires
combining analytical chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology,
pathology, physiology, and toxicology — and often draws on such
fields as endocrinology and immunology.

Linking chemical causes to environmental effects in the deep
ocean is particularly difficult, as the basic biochemistry,
physiology, and population biology of deep-sea creatures are
even less well known than those of coastal species. Experimental
studies on deep-sea species are at best difficult, often impossible,
and always costly.

Knowing exactly how a specific chemical causes a specific
biological change — in other words, knowing a particular biochemi-
cal process or mechanism — can facilitate the evaluation of effects in
species for which experimentation is not possible. One biochemi-
cal process central to the toxicity of many compounds is that by
which organisms change the structure of a foreign chemical.

Such structural change can alter the properties of chemicals,
and often aids their elimination. This is often an adaptive or
protective process, but some products of the structural change can
actually be more toxic than the original chemical. In fact, many
cancer-causing chemicals become so only after being biochemically
converted into products that bind to DNA, resulting in mutations
that may lead to cancer.

Enzymes do the work in living cells, including the work of
effecting structural changes in foreign chemicals. In a com-
plex process of genetic regulation, called "induction," cells
can respond to the presence of foreign chemicals by beginning to
synthesize, or synthesizing more of, certain enzymes — enzymes
that structurally change chemicals. Specific chemicals, or specific
molecular patterns that define families of chemicals, induce the
synthesis of a family of enzymes known as the cytochrome P450s.
Thus, an increased amount of cytochrome P450 can be used as a
biomarker for the presence of a given chemical or chemical family.

Scientists measure the induced amount of an enzyme in
several ways. They can measure the rate at which the enzyme does
its work; this is called the "activity" of the enzyme. They can
measure increased amounts of the enzyme itself, with antibodies
that specifically bind to the enzyme. The antibodies can be tagged,
and the tags can be developed somewhat like a photographic
image is developed — enabling the scientist to "see" the enzyme.

Experiments

with deep-sea

species are

at best

difficult,

often

impossible,

and always

costly.

/ft (5) and binds to
a receptor

which in turn (3

Dlnducer binds to DMA

enters

4) This stimulates the process

which results in synthesis ol

specific P450 enzymes.

(other biochemical changes and

toxic ettects can also result.

The pathway of
P450 induction

in mammals.
The pathway in

fish is similar
in most respects.

The activity and antibody detection
methods are relatively inexpensive for
scientists to perform.

Each of the chemical families and
subfamilies that induce P450 synthesis
are comprised of many individual
compounds, up to more than 200 in the
case of PCBs. But laboratory studies
show that the most hazardous or most
toxic members of each group specifically
effect the induction. Thus, 3,3/,4/4'-tetrachlorobiphenyl, 3,3',4,4',5'-
pentachlorobiphenyl, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (a PCDD);
2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzofuran (a PCDF); and several such PAHs
as the carcinogen benzo[a]pyrene all produce a spectrum of bio-
chemical and toxic effects — of which P450 induction is the most
well characterized.

We purified a particular enzyme that we call cytochrome P450E
from marine fish. It converts PAHs into mutation-causing prod-
ucts, and these same aromatic hydrocarbons induce the enzyme's
synthesis. The highly toxic dioxins, dibenzofurans, and PCBs are
also inducers of P450E. This induction is proving to be an early and
explicit biomarker of these contaminants.

To make use of P450E as a biomarker we first had to develop:

• a reliable method for purifying the enzyme from fish,

• accurate tests of the enzyme's activity, and

• antibodies that specifically bind to the enzyme.

To use the biomarker in deep-sea species, we had to be certain
that our capture and retrieval of fish from as deep as 3,000 meters
would not alter the biomarker's biochemistry. Specialists in fish
taxonomy identified the catch. Organs, usually liver, were re-
moved, flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen, and sent to the laboratory
for analysis. Finally, we found that a species of rattail fish, Conj-
phaenoides armatus — widely distributed in the deep sea — was the
best candidate.

We subsequently obtained samples of the rattail fish on cruises
to two sites about 1,600 kilometers apart in the North Atlantic-
Hudson Canyon off the eastern United States, and Carson Canyon
off Newfoundland. Using the enzyme activity assay and antibodies
to the P450E enzyme, we detected high levels of the biomarker in
the southern group's livers, but very low levels in the northern
group's livers. Traditional analytical chemistry revealed that the
PCB concentrations in the fishes' livers echoed that of the P450E
concentrations, with the southern group again having the higher
numbers.

The demonstration of P450 induction in deep-sea rattail fish
was the first use of antibodies to detect this type of biochemical

Site I
Hudson Canyon Area

change in fish, a change linked to environmental pollutants. The
induction indicates that PCBs or other chemicals are present at
levels high enough to cause this biochemical effect in animals far
removed from known point-sources of the chemicals. While we
cannot yet identify the chemical sources, the pollutants could be
coming from the Hudson River via the
Hudson Canyon trough on the continental
slope, or from offshore dumpsites via lateral
transport.

In a more recent collection of the same
species of rattail fish near a deep-water
(2,500 meters) dumpsite off the U.S.
eastern seaboard, we again detected high
levels of the chemically inducible cyto-
chrome P450E. Other, subsequent studies of
fish in coastal regions of North America and
Europe showed a close relationship between
the content of the induced enzyme and the
content of PCBs and PAHs. We have even
seen some P450E induction in whales. Such
findings strengthen our interpretation of the
results obtained from deep-sea fish.

In the future, biomarkers such as cyto-
chrome P450E could supplant analytical
chemistry as a first screen for the presence of
many chemical contaminants, including
PAHs, PCBs, PCDFs, PCDDs, and possibly

others yet unknown. Analytical chemistry, while being the tradi-
tional method for identifying chemical contaminants in effluents,
marine animal tissues, and sediments, is often very costly and time
consuming. Many complex organic molecule mixtures do not even
yield to analytical chemistry methods for identification and quanti-
fication. The time and cost for biomarker analysis are generally
much less than for chemical analysis. Moreover, biomarkers
indicate the biological effect of chemicals, something not possible
with chemical analysis alone.

The induction of P450 enzymes could be a first signal of bio-
logical change, one that could be followed by such effects as
diseases resulting from the transformation of chemical con-
taminants into carcinogens. The chemicals that induce biomarker
enzymes might also affect the reproduction of coastal and deep-sea
life. But linking such biochemical changes as induction to repro-
duction or other population effects involves an added complexity.
The presence of contaminants in fish, as indicated by P450E in-
duction, presents the threat that these chemicals might return to us
in our diet, but the magnitude of this risk is poorly understood.
Some scientists believe that most human cancers are preventable,

Site II

Carson Canyon Area

Collection
Sites

Location of the two

sampling sites.

The Hudson Canyon

area encompasses the

106 site, the Carson

Canyon area is far
removed from known
contaminant sources.

How benzo[a]pi/rene
is metabolized in fish.
Benzo[ct]pi/rene (I) is
converted by cyto-
chrome P450 into
product II, which in
turn can be converted
to products HI or IV.
These products can
be excreted or even
acted on again by
cytochrome P450.

< onj ugdtion

r\< ni

Binding to
Cell Molecules

Conjugation

,ind f\< icliiin

OH Conjugation

w and Exc rHion

and associated with factors — such as cigarette smoking — other
than chemical pollutants in the environment. By comparison,
conferees at a meeting to discuss cancer risk associated with
contaminated seafood concluded that although the risk is real,
the added number of cancers would likely be small, and very
difficult to define. Food fish are not taken from the very deep
ocean, presumably reducing this problem for deep-ocean
disposal.

Debate concerning waste disposal in the oceans must
consider not only the potential hazards, but also the means to
monitor disposal sites for chemically induced biological change.
As described here, a critical element in judging the chemical
hazard to living systems is the ability to detect and evaluate both
exposure and effects. Biomarkers for chemical exposure and
effect — such as cytochrome P450E, specific DNA damage, and
others — will be an essential component of such monitoring.

Many U.S. waste-disposal practices should not continue.
Without change, some coastal regions would soon be-
come fit for little other than waste disposal. In such
regions, no resources could be taken, or even expected. Whether
society might accept adverse changes in deep-sea animal health in
lieu of greater potential for adverse human health effects from
land-based and coastal ocean disposal is a matter for serious
discussion.

In the realm of chemical effects in the environment, it is often a
long, arduous process to reach the point of being able to say "I
know" instead of "I suspect." If we are to approach the question
of waste disposal and its consequences from a rational standpoint,
then it is essential that we continue vigorous, basic research on
mechanisms of toxicity in both animals and humans. It is only
through such research that we will understand the consequences of
waste disposal, and attain the means to monitor and/or counter
these effects.

Sludge

Reaching Bottom
at the 106 Site,
Not Dispersing
as Plan Predicted

Deep-water municipal se\\ age-sludg

By June 30, 1992, when New York City plans to end ocean
dumping, more than 25 million wet tonnes of sewage sludge
will have been dumped at the 106 site about 160 kilometers
off the coast of New Jersey in waters more than 2.4 kilometers
deep. Although disposal of massive quantities of wastes in
nearshore, relatively shallow environments is not unusual, this
sludge disposal is the largest manmade perturbation of a deep-
ocean environment.

hi September, 1989, a multidisciplinary research team* visited
the site with the deep-diving submersible DSV/ Alvin. Some 7.25
million tonnes of sludge had already been dumped when the team
made their visit, the purpose of which was to verify a computer
model of the sludge sinking to the bottom and determine what
biological effects it might have if it was reaching the bottom.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency's Moni-
toring Plan, 1988, the sludge was supposed to have totally
dispersed during its descent from the surface, with none detectable
on the bottom. Our model took into account new information on
currents and sludge particle size and fall velocity, and predicted
that measurable amounts of sludge would reach the bottom.

We had support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's National Undersea Research Program for 10

Animals living on
the bottom near the
106 site are typical
deep-sea creatures,

such as starfish,
shrimp, sea urchins,
and sea cucumbers.

days' use of the R/ V Atlantis II and Alvin, as well as support for
seabed sample analyses. Ginger Fry and Brad Butman of the U.S.
Geological Survey (USGS) in Woods Hole developed a model that
calculated a contour plot of sludge concentrations on a theoretically
flat seafloor over distances as far as 250 kilometers from the site and
guided our sampling strategy. Studies of near-bottom currents will
allow more sophisticated models to be developed.

We knew the bottom was not flat even though the area was

below the more rugged terrain
of the continental slope. Joyce
Miller of the University of
Rhode Island Seabeam group
helped us produce a contour-
chart of an area of about 1,350
square kilometers, including
about 210 square kilometers of
the site. The chart's 10-meter
depth contours identified
several depressions that might
trap particles settling from
the surface. Alvin's manipu-
lator carefully sampled the
upper sediments in those
depressions, and outside the
depressions for comparison.

Samples are still being analyzed by the research team. But from
levels of trace metals found by Mike Bothner of the USGS, bacterial
spores of Clostridium perfringens — a human sewage indicator-
found by Ivor Knight and Rita Colwell of the University of Mary-
land, and stable isotope ratios found in the animals living in the
sediment by Cindy Van Dover of Woods Hole Oceanographic Insti-
tution, we can definitely say that measurable amounts of sludge are
reaching the bottom immediately to the west of the site, as predicted
by the model.

This project should help us to better understand how the sludge
is transported, and to learn whether the rich variety of deep-sea
species is influenced by the sewage sludge input.

— Frederick Grassle

Project Coordinator

Rutgers University

f In addition to those mentioned, team members were: Rosemarie Petrecca,
Rutgers University; James Robb, Branch of Atlantic Marine Geology of
the USGS; Michael Moore, John Stegeman, and John Farrington, Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Robert WJu'tlach, University of
Connecticut.

Managing

Dredged

Materials

by Robert M. Engler

The U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers regulates
dredging from water-
ways throughout
the country.

avigable waterways and their role in transportation
and defense are vital components of the economic
growth and stability of coastal nations. However, most
near-shore and estuarine areas are naturally shallow.
Depths that support modern shipping are maintained
only by dredging, which removes sediment and aquatic soil that
naturally accumulate in navigation channels.

Annually, hundreds of millions of cubic meters of dredged
material are brought up from the world's harbors, and it must be
placed and managed in an economically and ecologically sound
manner. Since the annual cost of port and waterway maintenance
worldwide ranges in the hundreds of millions of dollars, officials
seek the least costly, environmentally sound methods of dredged-
material transport and placement — either on land, at sea, or at
another estuarine location.

Dredged material is a mixture of sand, silt, and clay. It can in-
clude rock, gravel, organic matter, and contaminants from a wide
range of agricultural, urban, and industrial sources. If it were not
for those contaminants, dredged sediments would consist only of
natural components of the Earth's crust deposited by natural
erosional and mineralization processes. Contaminated or other-
wise unacceptable dredged material accounts for only a small
fraction of the total — less than 10 percent in the U.S. and globally.

Uncontaminated, or "clean" dredged material may be placed at
the broadest range of locations with environmental concern limited
only to physical impacts, the most significant of which is habitat
modification in the aquatic environment. Clean material has many
positive uses. These include the development and enhancement of
wetlands, and aquatic and wildlife habitat; beach nourishment;

Dredges sometimes

empty material

directly onto barges,

which transport the

material elsewhere.

land development; offshore mound and island construction;
agriculture; mariculture; and construction aggregate. The benefits
of such positive uses are significant and should receive highest
priority in a dredged-material management policy. An increase in
the positive use of dredged material would signal a decrease in the
use of disposal sites.

In industrialized harbors, typical contaminants are toxic metals,
organohalogens like PCBs, petrochemical by-products, excess
nutrients, and harmful microbes. As many waterways are
located in industrialized areas, the disposal of contaminated
sediments generates serious environmental concerns.

Regulatory controls in the United States are developed by the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through the authority

of the Marine Protection Research
and Sanctuaries Act of 1972. This
act authorizes the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers to issue
permits for the ocean placement
of dredged material, and apply
the EPA's controls. Internation-
ally, the 1972 Convention on the
Prevention of Marine Pollution by
Dumping of Wastes and Other
Matter, often called the London
Dumping Convention (LDC, see
page 29) regulates ocean place-
ment of dredged material. In
1986, the convention agreed on
special guidelines for the manage-
ment of such placement.

The LDC guidelines separate
the regulation and assessment of
dredged material from that of

other wastes, and require alternatives to ocean placement to be
reviewed. The alternatives are assessed on the basis of such
human-health and environmental concerns as safety, economics,
and the possible exclusion of future uses for disposal areas. Fur-
thermore, the guidelines recognize that "Sea disposal [of dredged
material] is often an acceptable disposal option," and encourage
positive uses. The LDC's approach and the EPA's regulations are
fully compatible.

Procedures for assessing dredged material include:

• analyzing toxicological characteristics,

• analyzing proposed placement site characteristics,

• reviewing placement methods, and

• considering alternate placement sites.

The beach, at right,
consists of sand
dredged from the
West Pearl River,
Louisiana. Originally
built in the 1950s,
the beach's size and
condition are main-
tained by periodic
additions of sand .
Below: the only
nesting colony of
brown pelicans in
Alabama breeds on

Galliard Island,
made entirely from
dredged materials.

.4* •

Dredged materials

can provide

agricultural land for

crops such as these

cabbages along the

Washington side of

Columbia River.

;*~r

-gn,.,- - .

-' ---Xl •>

The EPA and Corps of Engineers classify dredged material
using the results of tests that determine the presence of specific
contaminants, their bulk toxicity, teachability, and biological
availability. Sediments that have toxic and biologically available
contaminants are banned from ocean placement. The tests range
from simple water leaches to multiorganism benthic bioassays.

Placement-site characteristics include topography, and proxim-
ity to recreation areas, fisheries, waterways, and sensitive
marine-resource areas. Proposed sites also must be amenable
to monitoring and management.

When dredged material is deposited at a placement site, the
release of contaminants from it may be drastically enhanced or

retarded, depending on
how the water-sediment
geochemical environment is
changed. For example, a
significant release of such
metals as zinc can occur
under acidic oxidizing condi-
tions, which do not normally
occur in aquatic placement.
Laboratory studies simulat-
ing upland placement where
drying and oxidation can
occur show that dredged
material so placed can
become acidic. Upland place-
ment of marine sediments
with a high level of sulfide
led, after several months

Suction dredges clear of drying and oxidation, to acid conditions and subsequent
out channels by metal leaching.
redistributing

sediments.

aboratory research also indicates, however, that there is
minor release of most manmade chemicals from dredged
material because they bind so tightly to clay and organic
matter.

Sediment-bound contaminants emphasize the need for deter-
mining the biological effects of the solid fraction. The solid phase
of dredged material rapidly settles to the bottom and has intimate
association with the benthic, or bottom-dwelling, organisms.
Sediment-bound contaminants may be made available to aquatic
biota through ingestion or direct contact by the organism or, on the
other hand, buried at the placement site with clean sediment
effectively isolating them from marine organisms. Regardless of
the chemical nature of the solid phase, the physical effects on
various organisms also must be thoroughly evaluated.

Mean water level

An island

made of dredged

materials offers

a diversity

of habitats.

Aquatic habitat

Grasses

Trees Shrubs , Marsh

A rviar

Upland habitat

Island habitat

Investigations have been carried out to determine the effects of
suspended dredged material on aquatic organisms, the ability of
organisms to migrate vertically through deposits of settled mate-
rial, and the bioaccumulation of sediment-bound contaminants.
The ecological effects of sediments contaminated with a wide range
of pollutants continue to be investigated by various organizations
in countries around the world. Results of these investigations form
the basis for the management of dredged material placement.

The short-term and long-term chemical, physical, and biologi-
cal impacts of open-water placement have been determined
by large investigations in numerous locations. The locations
were largely regarded as nondispersive or low-energy environ-
ments with regard to sediment resuspension or transport. Chemi-
cal effects in the water column duplicated the laboratory test results
previously reported.

When material was placed in a nondispersive aquatic site,
movement or release of the chemical constituents in relation to
reference sites was not apparent. Suspended particulate concentra-
tions were less than concentrations that have been established to
have an impact on a broad range of aquatic organisms. These low
concentrations persisted only for a few hours.

A significant impact is the formation of mounds of dredged
material at aquatic placement sites. Biological recolonization of
these mounds demonstrates that conditions eventually return to the
original state. Biological recolonization is rapid on fine-grained
sediment, while sandy substrates exhibited slower recovery. Sites
that receive multiple placements continue to reflect physical im-
pacts and must be carefully chosen to minimize damage to impor-
tant amenities of the marine environment.

The sediment characteristics that most affect the mobility and
biological availability of dredged materials are particle size, organic
matter content, amount and type of ions, amount of iron and

Coarse-grained dredged material

Sedimentation area

Influent

Coarse-grained W
dredged material

Dredged material is

de-watered in special

containment areas as

shown above.

manganese, oxidation/reduction potential, pH, and salinity.

When the physical-chemical environment of a contaminated
sediment is altered by removal and placement, the chemical and
biological processes important to mobilization or immobilization
of potentially toxic materials may be affected. Frequently, an
altered physical-chemical environment that results in the release
of contaminants from one chemical form will favor other immobi-
lizing reactions. As an example, aquatic placement under reducing,
neutral pH conditions will favor immobilization of toxic metals
while having little effect on mobility of organohalogens. The
influence of physical-chemical conditions associated with various
placement methods on the release of contaminants must be
identified.

In addition to the chemical properties of the contaminant, the
chemical and physical properties of the dredged material will

influence the mobility
of contaminants at
relocation sites. A
number of readily
identified properties of
dredged material affect
the mobility and
biological availability
of various contami-
nants. Some of these
properties can change
when the material is
moved from one type
of disposal environ-
ment to another;
whereas other proper-
ties are not affected by
changes in water
content, aeration, or
salinity.

Much of the
dredged material
removed during harbor
and channel mainte-
nance dredging con-
tains a high proportion of organic matter and clay and is biologi-
cally and chemically active. It is usually devoid of oxygen and may
contain an appreciable amount of sulfide.

These conditions favor effective immobilization of many con-
taminants provided the dredged material is not subject to mixing,
resuspension, and transport induced by waves or currents. Coarse-
textured sediments that have a low organic matter content are much
less effective in immobilizing metal and organic contaminants.

Ponding depth -i r Freeboard

Weir

Fine-grained dredged material

Effluent

These materials do not tend to accumulate contaminants unless a
contamination source is nearby. Should sediment contamination
exist, then potentially toxic substances may be released to the water
column or leaching and uptake of contaminants by plants may
occur under intertidal or land placement conditions.

Many contaminated sediments are initially anoxic and have
a near-neutral pH. Subaqueous disposal into quiescent
waters will generally maintain these conditions and favor
immobilization of contaminants. By contrast, certain noncalcareous
sediments contain appreciable reactive iron and particularly re-
duced sulfur compounds. These sediments may become moder-
ately to strongly acid upon gradual drainage and subsequent
oxidation, as may occur when upland disposal takes place. This
offers a high potential for mobilizing potentially toxic metals.

For sediments that have been determined to represent a high
environmental risk, placement methods favoring containment of
potentially toxic substances should be considered.

Many examples demonstrate that highly contaminated
dredged material can be managed in ocean locations if sufficient
care is exercised with site selection to ensure that the material is
isolated from the biotic zone of the marine system. This approach
can involve site management techniques such as covering with
clean sediment, or locating sites in abiotic areas. The available
scientific and engineering data indicate that, for the greater part,
dredged material should be regarded as a highly manageable
resource for productive use in the marine environment.

No simple solution to the placement of contaminated dredged
material exists, but with proper management, the aquatic environ-
ment can offer a logical and environmentally sound alternative to
land-based sites. The approach of carefully managing open-water
sites should be considered a primary management solution to a
perplexing problem. The same degree of waste management
should also be strictly applied to land containment or inland
disposal of dredged material. The majority of sediments dredged
from the coastal zone can be used for a wide range of productive
and beneficial uses that should be a high priority in the selection of
placement alternatives.

Many

contaminated
sediments are

initially
anoxic and
have a near-
neutral pH.

Robert M. Engler is Manager of the Environmental Effects of
Dredging Programs in the Environmental Laboratory of the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station in
Vicksburg, Virginia. Since 1977, he has served as a U.S. State
Department representative at the annual meetings of the London
Dumping Convention's Consultative and Scientific Group on
Dumping, and since 1988 has been Chairman of the group.

Tailoring Waste Disposal
to Economic Realities

The economics of waste disposal is a special case of transporta-
tion economics. In transportation economics, the problem is to move
a commodity from a place where it has a lower value to a place where
it has a higher value without spending more on transportation than
the difference in the commodity's value between locations. The big
distinction for waste disposal is that the "commodity" (waste)
typically has cost, or negative value, at both locations: a large
negative value at its point of origin and presumably a smaller
negative value at its disposal site.

If, for equivalent benefits, transportation costs to ocean sites are
lower than to onshore disposal sites, then ocean disposal would be
preferred. Significantly lower transportation costs do in fact appear
to explain those cases where ocean disposal has been chosen over
onshore disposal. The real problem arises in measuring the benefits
gained. Waste-disposal benefits occur mainly as reduced environ-
mental costs, such as reduced risk to human health, less damage to
living resources, fewer insults to aesthetic and recreational ameni-
ties, and so on.

Largely because of scientific unknowns, but in part because of
limitations in economic technique, such environmental benefits and
costs have not been readily measurable for ocean disposal. However,
indirect inferences about their relative magnitudes may be attempted
by using direct measures of transportation costs, which comprise
packaging, Jiandling, and hauling costs.

Thomas Leschine of the University of Washington and I, for
example, estimated in 1985 that the cost of transporting sewage
sludge from the New York City region to the deepivater dwnpsite
106 miles offshore was four times larger than the cost of transport-
ing it to the existing dwnpsite 12 miles offshore. Still, New York
area disposal authorities were required to move to the 106 site,
implying that environmental costs to society at the 12-mile site were
judged to be much larger than — at least triple — those incurred by
disposal at the more distant deepwater site.

Last year, after New York City invested tens of millions of
dollars in new barges to use the deeper site, Congress outlawed
ocean dumping altogether. This, in turn, implies that the net
environmental benefits gained from the greater onshore disposal
costs must exceed even those available from hauling the sludge 106
miles offshore. Notwithstanding the legislation, scientific and
economic results demonstrating this advantage have not been
forthcoming.

71)

A somewhat less abstract facet of the ocean waste-disposal issue
is a widespread perception of underworld involvement. Leschine
and I gathered indirect evidence on this question, too. One New
York company that concentrated its investments in off-Broadway
shows and toxic waste disposal was promoting a scheme to trans-
port toxic-laden New York sludge in surplus tankers to the Carib-
bean as fertilizer spray for banana plantations.

To the CEO of this company, I mentioned the name of my
upcoming interview at another waste disposal firm in New Jersey.
"Sure, I know him," said the New York exec. "My uncle used to
work for his family."

"Is that so?" I dutifully pursued.

"Yeah," he continued, "my uncle was a tailor. . . . He worked
in cement."

— James M. Broadus

Director, Marine Policy Center

Woods Hole Oceanogmphic Institution

CALL FOR
EXHIBITS

The Marine Technology Society Presents:
"Science and Technology for a New Oceans Decade"

September 26-28, 1990 • Washington, DC Convention Center

Society ol
Mechanical Engineers

TECHNICAL SESSIONS:

Global change
Coastal issues
Advances in computing
Role of space systems
Trends for the 1990's
Pollution

Offshore structures
Marine resources

MTS '90 Exhibits and Registration Committee,
-nOO Fair Lakes Court, Fairfax, VA 22033- Ms.
Susan Novak-Braken or Carol Frisbee (703)
631-6200 FAX: (703) 818-9177

33D

SHORT COURSES:

• Technology Advances in Underwater
Photography

• Developments in Expendable
Oceanographic Instrumentation

« Review of Ocean Data Telemetry

• Understanding the Rules & Procedures
Governing the Export of U.S.
Oceanographic Technology

• Advances in Application of Ocean Acoustics
for ASW

• Application of Geographic Information
Systems to Ocean Research

• Ocean Engineering Propulsion

Co-Participants:

• American Society of

Mechanical Engineers

• The Society for

Underwater Technology

• The Oceanography Society

T. M, Hawley,
formerly Assistant
Editor o/Oceanus,
is now Editor of
Golob's Oil Pollu-
tion Bulletin in
Cambridge,
Massachusetts.

Herculean Labors

to Clean
Wastewater

by T. M. Hawley

ccording to mythology, when Hercules arrived at the
stables of King Augeas, 30 years' worth of muck from
the king's 3,000 cattle had accumulated. As one of his
12 Labors, Hercules was under orders to clean the
stables in one day. Since one cow produces roughly
18 wet tonnes of waste in a year, he had about 1.6 million wet
tonnes to get rid of. That's nearly the amount of sewage sludge
that New York City disposes of at the 106 site every four months,
according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates.

Hercules cleaned the stables by a disarmingly simple method:
He rerouted two rivers so they would flow through the stables and
flush the filth into an estuary. His ecological conscience was strong
enough to urge him to put the rivers back in their normal courses
before nightfall, but it seems he never gave a thought to the envi-
ronmental impact his feat was having downstream.

The sheer volume of this tsunami of sewage could have filled a
huge expanse of wetlands and buried sediment-dwelling plants
and animals living far offshore. The nutrient load would have set
off a meteoric and far-flung algal bloom and catastrophic drop in
dissolved oxygen. Had such a civil engineering project actually
ever been carried out in ancient times, we might still be able to see
traces of its effects in sediment cores today.

The image of clean water sweeping sewage away downstream
is a strong one — meaningful to the ancient Greeks and still repeated
every day in toilets around the world. But wastewater is more than
simply solids fouling a stream of clean water. It is a river of
biological potential that is only partially addressed in the standard
"primary" and "secondary" treatment technologies (see diagram,
page 32). Although these technologies effectively separate solid
wastes from the water that carried them out of our homes, they
produce considerable amounts of sludge in the process, and
usually fail to remove many inorganic nutrients that dissolve in the
water along the way. Those nutrients — nitrate, phosphate, and
others — must be removed if the water is to have a minimal impact
on the environment. And then there is the sludge: It cannot be
dumped in U.S. waters after 1991, and fewer communities are

willing to allow their landfills to harbor the material.

Increasingly, excess nutrients in the world's coastal waters
trigger red tides and eutrophication, scientists say. In 1988, a
bloom of Ptychodiscus brevis, a type of phytoplankton normally
restricted to the Florida Gulf Coast, devastated the dolphin popula-
tion as far north as New Jersey. The phytoplankton' s spread to the
Atlantic may have been assisted by excess nutrients there. In and
around the Baltic Sea, effects of eutrophication — benthic depletion
of oxygen and loss of species diversity, and increased frequency
and range of algal blooms and turbidity — have been linked to
excess nutrients introduced by human activities.

The success of sewage treatment is usually gauged by compar-
ing certain quantities in the "influent," or wastewater flowing into
a sewage treatment plant, to those in the "effluent," or treated
water discharged to the environment; typical successes are listed in
the table below. The essential difference between primary and sec-
ondary treatment is that primary treatment uses mainly gravity to
remove solid material, whereas secondary treatment combines
biology with gravity. The biology comes in the form of microor-
ganisms that eat particles too small to settle out during primary
treatment. The particles thus are transformed into living material,
which, after it dies, sinks in secondary settling tanks. Both primary
and secondary treatment produce sludge, or the solid material
removed during treatment. Secondary treatment, not surprisingly,
produces nearly twice as much sludge as does primary.

In the face of coastal eutrophication and diminishing sludge
disposal options, alternative sewage treatment technologies are
becoming more attractive. These systems usually address either
sewage's biological potential more directly than standard treatment
does, or technologically lower sludge production. Whatever the
treatment method, the objectives are to discharge effluent that is

What's Left After Sewage Treatment

Less nitrogen
and phos-
phorus in
effluents
discharged
into coastal
waters would
likely reduce
the occurrence
and range of
red tides.

Typical percent removal

Biological Oxygen Demand The amount of dissolved

Primary treatment
35

Secondary treatment
85

(BOD)

Nitrogen

Phosphorus

Suspended solids

oxygen necessary for the
aerobic decompsition of
organic matter in water.

Becomes a nutrient, when
combined with hydrogen or
oxygen to form ammonia,
nitrate, or nitrite.

Becomes a nutrient, when
combined with oxygen to
form phosphate.

Undissolved material sus-
pended in water.

1 5 to 20

cleaner than the waters receiving it, keep sludge to a minimum,
and dispose of sludge in an environmentally responsible manner.

A system called "advanced primary" treatment adds synthetic
polymers and ferric chloride to wastewater early in the treatment
process, which cause suspended solids in primary settling tanks to
coagulate and sink. In advanced primary treatment, Biological
Oxygen Demand (BOD) removal and sludge production is about
midway between primary and secondary treatment, and sus-
pended solids removal is about equal to secondary treatment. An
advocate of advanced primary treatment, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology Professor of Civil Engineering Donald R. F. Harle-
man, says that in Scandinavia this system removes 95 percent of
the nitrogen and about 30 percent of the phosphorus entering it.

In Florida, the Iron Bridge treatment plant serves part of Orlando
and a few nearby communities, the fourth-fastest-growing met-
ropolitan area in the United States. In 1984, the plant had
almost reached its design capacity of 24 million gallons a day, and
the communities faced building moratoriums unless capacity could
be significantly increased and effluent disposed of acceptably. The
solution was found in using reclaimed and natural wetlands to
"polish" the effluent prior to its discharge into the St. Johns River.

What is now known as the Orlando Easterly Wetlands Recla-
mation Project was constructed on a previously drained wetlands,
and encompasses a 6.6-square kilometer wilderness park.

Already clean to secondary standards, effluent from Iron
Bridge flows through the reclaimed wetlands that consist of three
plant communities — deep marsh, mixed marsh, and hardwood
swamp. In 1989, this system removed 80 to 90 percent of the total
nitrogen and phosphorus from the water flowing through it. The
wetlands are cellularized by an array of earthwork berms, or dikes,
that allow for precise flow control and monitoring, and any mainte-
nance or harvesting that might be necessary.

After filtering through the reclaimed wetlands, the Iron Bridge
effluent then passes through a natural wetlands before final dis-
charge to the St. Johns River. An environmentalist group, however,
first protested that a continuous flow of highly treated effluent
would adversely change the character of the natural wetlands. The
group, the Nature Conservancy, previously owned the natural
wetlands, and stipulated during the change of ownership to the St.
Johns River Water Management District that the natural wetlands'
character was not to change. Eventually the two parties struck an
agreement to closely monitor changes in the natural wetlands, and
to mitigate specified detrimental changes should they occur.

In other places with long growing seasons, other wetlands have
been engineered to polish sewage-plant effluents. These projects
range from the relatively natural conditions of Orlando's system to
"rock marshes" — fields of small rocks that have effluent flowing
beneath the surface, and such plants as water iris or canna lilies
growing up through them.

Entrance/
Parking

Scale it'eel!

Artificial wetlands are cleaning wastewater even in New
England, despite its short growing season. One system is called
"Solar Aquatics." It treats either raw sewage or septage, rather
than the effluent of a conventional treatment plant. In the confines
of a greenhouse, a series of 5,000-liter clear plastic silos are home to
engineered ecosystems that progressively convert the wastewater's
organic matter and inoganic nutrients into bacteria; phyto- and zoo-
plankton; algae;
higher plants such Orlando Easterly Wetlands Reclamation Project and Wilderness Park

as duckweed and

.,
bulrushes; snails;

and fish.

In Providence,
Rhode Island, a Sol-
ar Aquatics system
treats nearly 60,000
liters a day of do-
mestic sewage laced
with metals such as
copper, zinc, and
cadmium. About
every two weeks,
half the floating
vegetation in the
system is harvested,
shredded, and com-
posted. An average
harvest is about 160
wet kilograms. This

is the system's "sludge." Removal of BOD, suspended solids, and
ammonia runs between 90 and 98 percent.

Material harvested from the Providence plant has yet to be
completely composted, but when it is, it will be tested for the
presence of metals and synthetic chemicals. If the concentration of
these contaminants is low enough for safe application in horticul-
tural settings, it will be used for this purpose. If the levels are too
high, Solar Aquatics developers say that the compost can be put
back into the system, and the toxic materials can be taken up by
tree seedlings. In trees, these contaminants will be effectively
sequestered from the human environment for the life of the trees.

Although these various innovative technologies are promising,
some large U.S. cities have a long way to go before achieving
environmentally friendly sewage treatment and sludge disposal.
While Chicago and Milwaukee package and market their sludge as
fertilizer for golf courses, in Boston and elsewhere, combined storm
and domestic sewage outfalls produce the same effect as Hercules's
labor at the Augean stables. Source reduction is virtually unheard
of in the context of domestic wastewater. Yet how many tonnes of
compostable material pass through garbage disposals and into the
sewers of the United States each year?

.... Wilderness Tr.nl

log/Walk Course

— Berm

2^ Primitive Campsite

ft- Shelter

® Restroom

Deep Marsh

Mixed Marsh

I Hardwood Swamp

two profiles

The Profane

...

Edward D. Goldberg

by Joseph E. Brown

I ust past his second-story office
window in Ritter Hall, the Pa-
cific Ocean laps gently on the
shore. It's a gorgeous, made-
I in-California morning, perfect
for relaxation and distraction. But
Edward D. Goldberg seems not to notice
the temptations beyond his window.

(continued on page 78)

The Poet

Paul Kilho Park

by Michael A. Champ

n 1931, in Kobe, Japan, the 63d
descendant of a Korean King was
born. His pursuit of knowledge,
understanding, and wisdom
would carry him throughout the
world and make him one of the leading
authorities on the disposal of wastes in
the ocean.

(continued on page 79)

As on most mornings, Goldberg is
already a half-hour into his daily work
at 7:30 A.M., scrunched down in his
swivel chair next to a word processor
just below a bookshelf lined with a red-
bound, multivolume set of Analytical
Chemistry.

All told, Goldberg has been on the
payroll of Scripps Institution of
Oceanography at the University
of California at San Diego for 41 years,
the last 31 of which have been as a
professor of chemistry. In fact, except
for a brief stint in the Navy during
World War II, it's the only job he's ever
known.

"Thanks to Dr. Goldberg," said a
University of Southern California
spokesman last year while awarding
him the prestigious Tyler Prize for Envi-
ronmental Achievement, "scientists and
policymakers now have an increased
knowledge of the contamination levels
of coastal waters in most parts of the
world. And the pollution measure-
ments in different laboratories are being
made on a comparable basis."

R. B. Clarke, Professor of Zoology at
the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne,
England, describes Goldberg as "the
doyen of marine environmentalists."
To John W. Farrington, former Professor
of Environmental Sciences at the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts and now Dean
of Education at the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), he's
"the most innovative, influential scholar
to ponder, investigate, write, and speak
about ocean pollution problems."

Goldberg has written 225 articles
and two books on marine chemistry and
human impact on the oceans (The Health
of the Oceans and Black Carbon in the
Environment). He presently serves on
editorial boards of four scientific jour-
nals, and was for a long time on the
board of this magazine. He has been a
tireless organizer of workshops, semi-
nars, and conferences on ocean subjects.
"Ask Ed for help," a colleague notes,
"and he'll come running at the drop of a
petri dish." Awards and guest lecture-

ships take pages to list.

When not head-down in his office
in La Jolla, chances are he is off wander-
ing the globe in such diverse places as
Switzerland (studying the rates of
accumulation of glaciers), Belgium
(investigating pollution in the North
Sea), Yugoslavia (discussing Mediterra-
nean chemistry), or Scotland (more
North Sea science).

Edward David Goldberg was born
in Sacramento, California. Although his
father, a high-school teacher, died when
Goldberg was very young, his mother,
a piano teacher, lived to age 90. "My
mother's longevity," he remembers with
a wry smile, "gives me a sense of how
long I might live if I hadn't smoked as
long as I did."

Goldberg received a degree in
chemistry from the University of Cali-
fornia at Berkeley in 1942. He served
as a naval officer in the South Pacific
during World War II, "helping to
demagnetize ships. I was totally bored
... if you can be bored in the middle of
a war."

After the war, he began his post-
graduate studies at the University of
Chicago. As one historian described it,
the university at that time was "a hot-
house environment" of science—
possibly the greatest concentration of
talent in the field of geochemistry in the
entire world.

Goldberg's personal mentor was
Harrison Brown, a brilliant
geochemist whose research
reached into outer space; he was, among
other things, the codiscoverer of meth-
ods to determine the age of meteorites
and the Earth. Goldberg wrote his first
five papers in collaboration with Brown;
they dealt with the minor metallic com-
ponents of iron meteorites — nickel,
cobalt, gallium, rhenium, palladium,
and gold.

Brown was obviously impressed
with his budding protege. On the
telephone one day in 1949, he men-

(continued on page 80)

At the age of 14 in Japan, Paul Kilho
Park was selected by the military to
receive kamikaze pilot training. He
passed the rigorous physical and psy-
chological tests just as World War II was
ending, but never received flight train-
ing. He returned to Korea after the war,
where he earned a degree from the
National Fisheries College in Busan
(now Pusan) in 1953.

During the Korean War, Park met
two Texas cowboys whose "can
do" attitude impressed him. He
decided to go to Texas A&M University
to further his education. He wrote Dale
F. Leipper, Chairman of the Oceanogra-
phy Department, that he was coming.
Having learned English from his Texas
friends and a dictionary, Park arrived at
College Station, Texas, and soon became
a chemical oceanographer. By the time
he received his M.S. in oceanography in
1957, he had become very interested in
the carbon dioxide system in seawater.

He next decided to go to the Califor-
nia Institute of Technology for a Ph.D.
So he bought a Nash Rambler, and
departed College Station. At Cal Tech,
he found Professor Samuel Epstein's
office and knocked on the door, intro-
duced himself, and said: "I have come
to be your student." The flabbergasted
Epstein told Kilho to first submit an ap-
plication, and sent him back to Texas
A&M. In later years, Epstein would
offer Park a postdoctoral fellowship,
without having applied. On his return
to Texas, Park re-enrolled. He received
his doctorate in oceanography, with
emphasis in chemistry, in 1961.

The Teacher

From 1961 to 1976, Kilho was a
faculty member at Oregon State Univer-
sity, becoming a professor of oceanogra-
phy in 1971. Park is considered by
many of his Oregon State students to be
one of the most memorable in their
academic careers, citing him especially
as a source of inspiration and applaud-
ing his drive for knowledge.

Park was extremely hard on stu-
dents. First, he was completely unambi-
guous about his course being the most
important that they were taking. (If you
don't believe that, just ask him.) Sec-
ond, they had to learn everything in it.
For Kilho, it was not sufficient to be able
to line up causes with effects; students
had to know the process and be able to
prove it at the blackboard. Also, they
had to defend two or more sides of an
issue, even if it was the short side.
Kilho's students had to be familiar with
at least one analytical method for each
element in the periodic chart.

Professor Park always handed out
lecture notes. He earned a reputation
for wearing out many copy machines,
because the notes were so comprehen-
sive. Many of his former students still
have these lecture notes some 20 or
more years later. Larry Swanson of the
State University of New York at Stony
Brook once had to go on a cruise in the
middle of Park's classes and had his
wife Dana sit in on the class and take
notes for fear of missing a word.

Park has always encouraged
graduate students, young scien-
tists, and professors to continue
to pursue their research and interests in
the face of adversity. In later years,
while visiting different campuses to
review research results with principal
investigators, he made it a point to meet
with the students and to give a seminar.
He has always strived to be at the
cutting edge of research and knows that
one must constantly push to find or stay
at that edge. He believes firmly in the
development of a hypothesis, its subse-
quent testing, and the iteration process
to revise the hypothesis.

The Scientist

As a chemical oceanographer, Kilho
was highly productive during the 1960s
through the '70s, spending long periods
at sea making scientific contributions in
the areas of nutrient relationships and

(continued on page 81)

tioned to Roger Revelle, then Director of
Scripps and interested in new scientific
talent, that Goldberg was about to
complete his Ph.D. in chemistry.
"Scripps was rather short of chemists at
the time," Revelle recalls, "and I had a
great respect and admiration for Harry
Brown. So I said, 'Send him [Goldberg]
along. We'll fit him in.'"

Goldberg began his career studying
how marine plants and animals take up
dissolved substances from seawater.
"He wanted to know," Revelle remem-
bers, "how diatoms, the tiny, one-celled
grasses of the sea, assimilate phosphate
and iron; how sharks accumulate iodine
in their thyroid glands; and how tuni-
cates, the most primitive animals with
something like a backbone, accumulate
vanadium."

Health of the Oceans. It was considered
the definitive statement of its time on
marine pollution. More important,
perhaps, was the basic question Gold-
berg raised in its pages: What is the
ocean's capacity for absorbing human
wastes? In the book, Goldberg also set
up the framework for the Mussel Watch
program, which he began to implement
in 1975.

Sponsored by the U.S. Environ-
mental Protection Agency, scien-
tists from five universities periodi-
cally analyzed filter-feeding molluscs
from more than 100 stations along the
U.S. coasts, generating a wealth of
valuable data. The program is now
international, having been implemented
in China, India, Russia, and many
developing countries.

Roger Revelle, looking for talent and short of chemists, said:
"Send him [Goldberg] along, we'll fit him in."

In 1968, Goldberg co-authored a
paper in Science on how winds were
carrying large amounts of DDT and
other pesticides from their land source
into the sea. The Science paper was a
personal landmark. It was the first in
which Goldberg dealt specifically with
ocean pollution, a field to which he has
primarily dedicated himself for the last
quarter century.

It has been environmental science
that accounts for most of the awards
heaped on his shoulders — for example,
the coveted Tyler Prize, the first Bost-
wick H. Ketchum award from WHOI,
even a carved garibaldi — California's
official fish — from the Oceans Founda-
tion of San Diego for developing an in-
novative program called the "Mussel
Watch" (see Oceanus Vol. 26, No. 2, page
18). Revelle facetiously calls the gar-
ibaldi a "stuffed goldfish" because of
its color.

In 1976, UNESCO published The

In the early 1980s, Goldberg heard
disturbing reports about a major die-off
in an oyster fishery in a French harbor.
Checking the reports, he learned that
there was a pleasure-boat marina in the
same harbor, not far from the stricken
oysters.

In California, there also were
reports of similar deformities and die-
offs of some marine organisms and, as
in the case of the French harbor, they
had occurred near marinas. Was there a
common denominator in the incidents?

To find out, Goldberg sampled the
water in more than 60 California har-
bors, each of which included at least one
small-craft marina, and identified the
source of trouble. It was tributyltin
(TBT, see Oceanus Vol. 30, No. 3, page
69), a highly toxic chemical that was
being added to most antifouling paints
to protect the bottoms of both pleasure
craft and commercial vessels.

(continued on page 82)

the carbon dioxide system in the ocean.
His work on carbon dioxide focused on
developing an understanding of how
physical, chemical, and biological
processes affect carbon dioxide concen-
trations.

Park also spent a lot of time in the
laboratory. Along with his graduate
students, he developed and tested
seagoing analytical equipment, deter-
mined effects of carbon dioxide on the
conductivity of seawater, and improved
methods for the analytical chemistry of
seawater, especially in the areas of gas
analysis, alkalinity measurement, and
nutrient determinations.

Park's scientific publication record
is admirable and diverse. He has more
than 50 papers in peer-reviewed jour-
nals, along with numerous reports,
reviews, and communications, and
many chapters in books. He also is well
represented in foreign literature, having
published papers in Japanese, Korean,
Spanish, and French. His publications
have dealt with wide ranging topics,
such as marine pollution, marine envi-
ronmental management, global condi-
tions and change, and international
coordination of marine science.

The Bureaucrat

In 1969, Park arrived in Washington
to become a program director in physi-
cal oceanography for the National
Science Foundation (NSF). In 1970, he
became head of the Oceanography
Section at NSF.

In 1976, he joined the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-
tion (NOAA) as an oceanographer for
the Outer Continental Shelf Environ-
mental Assessment Program. Between
1977 and 1983, he was Manager of the
NOAA Ocean Dumping Program.

Kilho was the right person in the
right place at the right time in the mid-
1970s when the United States, through
NOAA, launched the development of a
comprehensive program in ocean-
dumping research. As a chemical
oceanographer with many years of sea-

going experience on several interna-
tional expeditions, he brought a unique
ability to apply science and people to
the scientific issues of ocean dumping.

His approach was simple. Find the
most talented people and give them an
opportunity to apply their knowledge to
ocean dumping. Accordingly, many
academicians and governmental scien-
tists who had not considered marine
pollution or ocean dumping as a re-
search area, moved swiftly to think
about the problems and to develop
fundamental questions that could be
answered by the scientific method.

Park did not like the longer bureau-
cratic way of doing things. He believed
in honor among his peers until proven
otherwise, and in getting on with the job
at hand. Park not only did not have any
hidden agendas but he told everyone
what he wanted to do and why, which
is unheard of among those who have
"Potomac fever."

Building on his research program
management experience at NSF, he
wanted to build a world-class research
program in NOAA for ocean dumping
and marine pollution research. Kilho
even paid for his own travel when his
travel budget was empty.

Once he was asked to meet with
people from the Office of Management
and Budget (OMB) and discuss why he
needed so many millions of dollars for
research. At the meeting, Park con-
vinced OMB to give his program
another million dollars. However, not
all of NOAA's programs supported
Park's efforts because many in the ranks
felt that pollution was too applied a
problem to be considered for basic
research funds.

The results of Park's approach to the
management of ocean dumping re-
search provided U.S. scientists, resource
managers, policymakers, and regulators
with a wealth of information that could
be used to guide policy. And they also
touched in a very significant way the
global community of scientists involved

(continued on page 83)

On the subject of ocean dumping,
Goldberg fidgets when he hears the
now-familiar (but, he claims, not scien-
tifically based) complaint that the
oceans are in deep trouble and they
shouldn't be used to accept man's
wastes in any way, shape, or form. Not
so, Goldberg grumbles, and for at least a
couple of decades, he hasn't hesitated to
speak out or write about the subject.

"There are both 'sacred' and 'pro-
fane' views of the so-called Virginity of
the oceans/" he says with a mischievous
twinkle in his eye. "My views belong in
the latter category."

In certain cases, he says, "controlled
discharge to the oceans may provide a

run counter to the mainstream. Com-
menting on this trait last year at a
seminar honoring Goldberg after he
received the Tyler Prize, a former
graduate student remarked that Gold-
berg reminded him of a giraffe.

As eyebrows arched around the
room, Roy Carpenter quickly explained:
"Ed always said to his students, 'Don't
be afraid to stick your neck out with an
unpopular idea if you know you're
right.' It was good advice. He's been
taking it himself for years."

Now nearing age 70, Goldberg
shows no signs of slowing down, nor
have the years dimmed his capacity for
sticking that figurative, giraffe-like neck

"There are both 'sacred' and 'profane'
views of the so-called 'virginity of

the oceans/ " Goldberg says.
My views belong in the latter category.

more reasonable disposal option than
land. The trouble is that during the last
two decades, environmental groups,
through effective politics and communi-
cation, have, for all practical purposes,
foreclosed that option."

He quickly adds that not just any-
thing should be dumped into the ocean.
Plastic waste and some toxic materials
have no place at sea, he says. But
certain industrial wastes, sewage, and
even some hazardous materials such as
low-level nuclear waste may well
belong at the bottom of the ocean, in
Goldberg's view.

Of course, Goldberg also adds, no
ocean discharge should be undertaken
without thorough scientific input to first
determine the "endpoints" of any given
area considered for discharge. An
endpoint, he explains, "is the concentra-
tion [of a substance] beyond which the
pollutant produces an undesirable
effect."

Ed Goldberg isn't afraid to lay it on
the line, even though his opinions may

into controversy. Some colleagues
suggest that Goldberg looks for a good
fight and that, like a fish battling up
current, his single-minded, often com-
bative stance is an ingrained part of his
nature.

"I suppose that not being afraid to
say something unpopular is what keeps
my juices flowing," Goldberg responds.
"I enjoy a good argument, and I refuse
to be quiet just because it seems the
thing to do."

To escape work pressures, Goldberg
watches movies, reads books, putters in
a garden at his home in Encinitas, just
north of Scripps, and — a major passion
in his life — he travels.

"I go to a movie theater at least
twice a week," he says, "usually alone.
That way, I don't have to argue with
anyone — even my wife — about whether
the film was good or not." Occasionally,
he takes one of his two teenage children
(two others are grown and "out of the

nest" as he puts it).

(continued on page 84)

in marine pollution research and marine
pollution processes.

Park took full advantage of the fact
that ocean dumping was a global issue
when he organized the International
Ocean Disposal Series so that scientists,
regulators, and policymakers, at home
and abroad, could gather together on a
periodic basis. At these meetings they
exchange research results and informa-
tion on ocean dumping, enhance the
scientific consideration of waste dis-
posal, and generate recommendations
and guidelines for future ocean disposal
research.

In government, one is supposed to
follow the directed path, not create it.
Kilho is an exception.

The Statesman

From 1984 to 1987, Park was the
Senior Advisor to the U.S. & China and
the U.S. & Japan programs. His ability
to read Chinese was valuable during
negotiations between the U.S. Marine
Pollution Delegation and China's
National Bureau of Oceanography
(NBO, now renamed SOA for State
Oceanic Administration).

In the late-1980s, he caught "UN
fever," and served as Deputy Director of
the Programme Activity Centre for
Oceans and Coastal Areas of the United
Nation's Environment Programme, in
Nairobi, Kenya.

The Father

If you ask Park about his greatest
accomplishments, he will refer to his
two sons and their mother — the
"Maiden of Grace" Sue Park — pointing
with great pride to their accomplish-
ments and the fact they did it by them-
selves. Both boys were National Merit
finalists, and went to the University of
California, Berkeley, for undergraduate
education. The older, Arvin, is an
assistant professor at the University .of
California, Davis, in computer science
with a Ph.D. from Princeton. The
second son, Robert, has an M.D. in

internal medicine from the University of
California, San Diego. Kilho is married
to Sharon A. MacLean, a fisheries
researcher for NOAA's National Marine
Fisheries Service in Narragansett, Rhode
Island.

The Visionary

Park has always been a determined
individual. He created an international
symposium series on the subject of
wastes in the ocean, which since 1978
has met every 18 months with a rigor-
ous publication schedule — one volume
published by Plenum Press, six volumes
by Wiley-Interscience, and six volumes
by the Krieger Publishing, and two
special issues of the Marine Pollution
Bulletin.

The Eighth International Ocean
Disposal Symposium was held in
Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, this last year,
and these papers are scheduled for
publication in a major journal. At first,
these symposia were a forum to bring
together the researchers working with
NOAA to study physical, chemical, and
biological processes connected with the
disposal of wastes in the sea.

As others heard of the meetings, the
symposia grew until they became one of
the top marine pollution meetings.
These meetings were really Kilho's way
of peer review in which the high level of
discussion elevated the level of research
higher and higher. To these symposia,
Park invited the leaders in each field
from all over the world to come and
give review lectures.

The NOAA Ocean Dumping Re-
search Program was phased out in the
mid-1980s because ocean dumping of
municipal and industrial wastes was
phased out by Congress so there was
nothing left to study. Deep-ocean
dumping of sewage sludge did not
begin until 1986 and has been studied
within NOAA ever since.

(continued on page 85)

"I read to escape, too. I like Dick-
ens, Mark Twain, and a few modern
authors. I recently finished a book on
the history of the Jews. It doesn't matter
what the books are, as long as they are
distinct from the subjects of my work."

Goldberg's travel schedule is a
hectic one, but he revels in it. "Ocean-
ographers have a really beautiful
pedestal on which to enjoy the good
life," he explains, "and that is travel.
Travel is a narcotic and I can't get
enough of it." He especially enjoys
visiting developing and unspoiled
places before they become too popu-
lar— Easter Island, for example.

What's next for the busy, feisty
Goldberg? "Right now I'm writing
another book. Like The Health of the
Oceans, it will be published by
UNESCO. Its theme is how man will ul-
timately utilize ocean space in the future
as he has with land space in the past."

There will undoubtedly be a lot of
conflict in using ocean space, but the
potential is there, Goldberg feels. In the
book, he lists four main uses — waste
disposal, mariculture, recreation, and
transportation. "The ocean is a fascinat-
ing place," he says, "and I'm having a
lot of fun writing the book." 'S-

Joseph E. Brown is a free lance writer living In Rockport, Maine. He is a former editor
of Oceans magazine, the author of 14 books, and writes frequently on marine science.

PACIFIC CONGRESS ON MARINE SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

PACON 90

TOKYO, JAPAN • JULY 16 - 20, 1990

TECHNICAL SESSIONS

Climate Change and Development ol the Waterfront

Ocean Space Utilization, Planning and Technology

Ocean Observing Systems and Numerical Models

Remote Sensing and Oceanographic Satellites

Advances in EEZ Mapping and Research

Technology of Fish Finding and Tracking

Marine Recreation and Park Technology

Developments in Marine Biotechnology

Undersea Vehicles and Ocean Robotics

Materials and Construction Methods

Maritime Transportation and Ports

Marine Environmental Protection

Special Session "News Events"

Offshore Structure Technology

Marine Policy and Regulations

Underwater Remote Sensing

Marine Application of GPS

Mariculture Technology

Marine Economics

Marine Mining

Ocean Energy

SWATH Ships

Offshore Oil

Tsunamis

WORKSHOPS

International Cooperation
Marine Minerals Development
Concepts for Ocean Space Utilization
Marine and Maritime Technology Education
Ocean Data Program for Operations Forecasts
Marine Recreation and Tourism: Boats and Offshore Facilities
Smart Building, Smart City on the Waterfront and in the Ocean
Standards and Criteria for the Evaluation and Estimation of
Artificial Space as Real Estate

For Information:

PACON 90

c/o Dept. of Civil Engineering
University of Hawaii
2540 Dole St., Holmes 383
Honolulu, HI 96822

The Poet

The Friend

Kilho is a self-taught poet and
pianist. He developed these talents to
improve his sensitivity and ability to
express himself. His great enthusiasm
for work springs from life itself. His
poet pen name is Momiji, which means
"Japanese Maple" in Japanese.

NEW YEAR'S POEM

Galloping December Horse's Symphony

goes on

Soon to enter its final movement
Mastering all the energy left and wisdom
For the final crescendo yet to come.

My first score years have been
A time of assimilation of three cultures.
I then became a trilingual survivor
Enjoying the orderliness of mathematics
and music.

My second score years have been
A total dedication to marine science
Working, working, working, full speed

ahead
Finally reaching a plateau at forty.

My third score years have been
The time to expand horizon as a human
Slowly, quietly and gently coming down;
Simplifying, selecting, nurturing,
writing.

My fourth score years shall be
The most melodious period of life
To see, feel, enjoy the beauty of being

human
Pacing steadfastly for the final crescendo.

—Momiji

Yawgoo Valley, Rhode Island
1 January 1990

My lunar calendar birthday is two days
after the December full moon in the Year of
the Horse. So, I am a December Horse.
This Lunar New Year is the Year of the
Horse, according to the Chinese zodiac.

Once you become a friend to Park,
he nurtures that friendship through all.
Do not let someone sacrifice one of his
friends because you now have two
bodies to deal with. There are many
levels of friendship with Kilho, and one
does not move between levels. He
refers to himself as 50 percent S.O.B. and
50 percent nice guy, but this is like
having one foot in ice water and one
foot in boiling water, and on the average
being OK.

The Dreamer

Park sees the forest although he
may not see each tree. He is more of a
French impressionist than a biological
illustrator. His inner goals are to be a
facilitator and motivator, with a need to
see the good side of people. He strives
for "simple understanding" of complex
issues.

He is fascinated with President
Kennedy's idea: "A time for being
human." His view of the 20th century
is a vision split between military and
economic wars. The 21st century offers
"survival wars for mankind as a spe-
cies"— and the opportunity to establish
some balance between the plants and
the animals. He sees this as a period to
preserve 10 trees for every 1 human
being.

Paul Kilho Park marches to a drum
that only a few hear or understand. He
never asks what something costs or why
we should not do it, but how. His
thinking and logic are sometimes three
to six moves ahead (as in a game of
chess). Thus, in the day-to-day mode,
one cannot often discern where he is
coming from or going to.

Michael Champ, an ocean scientist, is
President of Environmental Systems
Development, Inc., in Falls Church,
Virginia.

•BOY, YOU HAD ME WORRIED FOR A MOMENT THERE — I THOUGHT YOU SAID

THREE TO FIVE YEARS!'

Picture Credits

p. 2, top to bottom: Ray Pfortner/ Peter Arnold, Inc.; Peter Arnold, Inc.; courtesy of Iver Duedall.
p. 3, top to bottom: David Seavey/© 1990, USA Today; courtesy of Judith Capuzzo; courtesy of
Iver Duedall. pp. 4-5: The Bettmann Archive (photo) and Doug Rugh (map), p. 7: Ray
Pfortner /Peter Arnold, Inc. p. 9: S. C. Delaney/ courtesy U.S. Congress, OTA; The Bettmann
Archive, p. 12: Charles Saxon/© 1983, The New Yorker Magazine, p. 24: NOAA/courtesy of
U.S. Congress, OTA. p. 25: The Bettmann Archive, p. 26: The Bettmann Archive, p. 27:
Capolongo/Greenpeace. p. 29: Doug Rugh/adapted from Panel on Particulate Wastes in the
Ocean, 1989. p. 30: courtesy Iver Duedall. p. 31: Doug Rugh/adapted from Wastes in the Ocean,
Vol. 1, 1983, John Wiley & Sons. p. 32: Jayne Doucette/adapted from Wastes in Marine Environ-
ments, 1987, U.S. Congress, OTA. p. 33: Jayne Doucette, data courtesy of London Dumping
Convention Secretariat, p. 39: courtesy Iver Duedall. p. 40: Ray Pfortner /Peter Arnold, Inc.
p. 41: Tim McCabe/courtesy U.S. Congress, OTA. p. 43: Jayne Doucette/adapted from U.S.
NRC, 1984. p . 44: Bettman Archives, pp. 45-53, all cartoons reprinted zvith permission, p. 45:
Charles Saxon/© 1983, The New Yorker Magazine; Tony Auth/ Universal Press Syndicate; John
Huehnergarth/Audubon. p. 46: Dick Wallmeyer /Press-Telegram, p. 47: Tom Darcy/Newsday.
pp. 48-50: Arnold Wiles/Marine Pollution Bulletin, Pergamon Press, p. 51: MacNelly/© 1987,
Tribune Media Services; Oliphant/© 1981, Philadelphia Inquirer and © 1988, Universal Press
Syndicate, p. 52: Mike Luckovich /Creators Syndicate; Dick Wallmeyer/ Press-Telegram, p. 53:
Mark Alan Stamaty/© 1988, Washington Post Writers Group, p. 55: courtesy Iver Duedall (top);
Jayne Doucette (bottom), p. 58: Jayne Doucette. p. 59: E. Paul Oberlander. p. 60: Jayne
Doucette. p. 61: Doug Rugh. p. 62: courtesy Fred Grassle. pp. 63 & 64: courtesy Iver Duedall.
p. 65: all courtesy M. Landin. p. 66: courtesy Iver Duedall. p. 67: Doug Rugh. p. 76: Carolyn
Sansone. p. 77: Carolyn Sansone. p. 86: Oliphant/© 1969 The Denver Post.

WASTES AND THE OCEAN

n the evolution of our civilization
Civitas (city) is formed where
Invention and industry blossom
Through cross-fertilization of

minds.
There, some men and women are

set aside

To produce science and philosophy,
To flower our art and literature.

Tn civitas, water is the medium of
life,

For drinking, transportation,

communication
And for the safe disposal of our

wastes.
We must continue our civil

orderliness
Through which wastes are disposed

safely.

he ocean, too, is used for waste

disposal
As the land and the atmosphere are

used
To bury, decompose, or disperse

wastes.
Let us be analytical and synthetical

on this
To harmonize our civilization with

the environ
So that our children see our

wisdom,
Not inherit our wastes.

-Momiji
Terre Mariae
9 March 1982

LETTERS

To the Editor:

I just read the letter from Victor Scheffer
and your reply in Volume 31, Number 4. A
little more needs to be said about the estimate
of minke whale populations.

The present number, 600,000 in the South-
ern Hemisphere, comes from properly con-
ducted sightings surveys, carried out during
six years. The confidence limits on this esti-
mate— the best we have for any whale popula-
tion— are plus-or-minus 50 percent. This
number is probably about 30 percent less than
when exploitation of this species began in 1972.

There are no valid estimates yet for minke
whales in the Northern Hemisphere, though
one might become available for the North
Atlantic later this year. All previously quoted
figures, including the 125,000 you cite, have
been discredited because they were obtained
by seriously flawed indirect methods.

How does such confusion arise? Primarily
because the International Whaling Commission

(IWC) Secretariat has gotten into the habit of
publicly distributing a table of numbers. This
table has not been updated for many years, so
the figures it contains are seriously at variance
with the recent work of the IWC's own Scien-
tific Committee — of which I have been a
member since 1959. As a result of my protesta-
tions to the committee in June, 1989, a promise
was extracted that this misleading table would
no longer be made available to enquirers.
Nevertheless, the damage has been done; the
erroneous figures have been published in
several recent books and articles and are bound
to be taken by their readers as authoritative.

A new table is being put together by a few
Scientific Committee members, including
myself, based strictly on the committee's work,
but to avoid political interference it will not be
published by the IWC.

Sidney Holt
Citta della Pieve, Italy

ORIGINAL

ANTIQUE MAPS
& SEA CHARTS

US. & WORLDWIDE

GRACE GALLERIES, INC

75 Grand Avenue

Englewood, N.J. 07631

(201) 567-6169

Call or write for listings
Mon.-Fri. 9:30-5 p.m. Sat. 10-2 p.m.
MARINE PAINTINGS • PRINTS

Call for Papers
First International Ocean Pollution Symposium

at University of Puerto Rico

Mayaguez, Puerto Rico

28 April - 2 May 1991

and

Call for Proposals to host
Second International Ocean Pollution Symposium

1993

The First International Ocean Pollution Symposium (IOPS, previ-
ously the International Ocean Disposal Symposia) is expected to
take place in Puerto Rico and this is a first call for abstracts and
inquiries. The Second IOPS is being planned now and the organ-
izing committee is requesting that interested countries submit a
preproposal expressing interest in hosting 2IOPS. The objective
of the IOPS series is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas
and information among scientists involved in marine pollution
and ocean disposal research.

Send inquiries related to either HOPS of2IOPS to:
Professor Iver W. Duedall, Organizing Committee Co-Chair-
man,

International Ocean Pollution Symposia Series
Dept. of Oceanography and Ocean Engineering

Florida Institute of Technology
Melbourne, FL 32901, USA FAX 1-407-984-8461

BOOK REVIEWS

1 /

' c<nint

of MulinvrAhoanl 1 1 is
Maicsty's Ship Bounty

BLIGH

SAM McKINNEY

Bligh: The True Account of the Mutiny Aboard
His Majesty's Ship Bounty by Sam McKinney.
1989. International Marine Publishing,
Camden, ME. 196pp. $22.95.

Sam McKinney's book on Captain Bligh
and the Bounty is unusual. In a writing style
that is both eloquent and exciting, this is an
authoritative and scholarly work that offers a
radically new view of a romanticized and
controversial incident in history.

Unlike other books on the Bounty, McKin-
ney does not treat the mutiny in isolation. He

T1HI1E CREST

OIF TIHI1E
WAV IE

ADVENTURES IN OCEANOGRAPHY

mini I mil

AUTHOR OF WAVES AND BEACHES

A lifetime of science —
and adventure.

For more than 40 years, Willard
Bascom has explored the seas in
search of knowledge. He has measured
waves and probed the ocean floor,
pioneered SCUBA diving and devel-
oped undeiwater mining techniques,
assessed the impact of pollution and
searched for sunken treasure. And all
the wonder and excitement of his dis-
coveries are brought brilliantly to life
in this engaging autobiography.

'Gripping and beautifully written
tales of exotic high adventure."

-San Francisco Chronicle

Also available from Anchor Books:
WAVES AND BEACHES

fft ANCHOR BOOKS

Vsl-y A division of Bantam Ooubteday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc.

paints a colorful and accurate backdrop of
Britain and the Royal Navy prior to the Napo-
leonic Wars. He tells of the peacetime navy's
scientific mission to fulfill the thirst for knowl-
edge of the scientifically inclined and much-
maligned "mad" King George III.

McKinney gently points out very early that
we have much to learn. He tells of James Cook,
the finest of all British seamen-explorers. A
captain famous for his gentle and considerate
nature, Cook had high regard for Bligh who
served as a 22-year-old sailing master on the
HMS Resolution. From Bligh's practices aboard
Bounty, it is obvious that he learned something
from Cook's humanitarianism and concern for
shipboard health.

We also learn that Bounty was not a
stately ship-of-the-line, nor a dashing
frigate, but a simple 91 -foot, beamy,
and somewhat ugly merchantman of 215 tons
that previously had been called Bethea. She
was much like many of the post-World War II
oceanographic research ships: conversions that
fulfilled missions way beyond the expectations
and intentions of their original designers.

McKinney chronicles the inefficiencies of
the naval system that Bligh had to overcome
before Bounty could sail from England. There
were delays in receiving orders from the
Admiralty. These prevented him from reaching
the Drake Passage and rounding Cape Horn
during the optimum season for reaching the
Pacific.

Most importantly, we read of how the tra-
ditional distance between master and crew on
Bounty was diminished to a point where he
was almost guaranteed to fail. Loyal marines
who provided an essential physical barrier
between master and crew did not embark on
the Bounty for lack of berths. Bligh was denied
the captain's isolation in the gallery cabin
because it had become a greenhouse for
breadfruit. (The ship was being sent to Tahiti
to fetch these fruit for transport to Jamaica as
experimental slave fodder.) Worse, and again
due to a lack of berths, Bligh had to fulfill the
dual function of master and purser. The purser
was the lightning rod who assumed the blame
for all inequity and insufficiency aboard Royal
Navy ships.

While McKinney describes the "real" Bligh
as a seaman of extraordinary capability who

used the lash less than most Royal Navy
captains, he also shows him as a man insecure
in command. As anyone who has been to sea
for extended periods knows, this insecurity
corrodes slowly, inevitably, and cumulatively
through any voyage. In Bligh, it was mani-
fested by his volcanic temper and refusal to
delegate. We also see the "real" Fletcher
Christian as a man of little courage, easily used
by others.

McKinney's faithful and exclusive adher-
ence to original documentation is obvious to
the reader. His principle sources were Bligh's
log of Bounty's voyage; the log of the HMS
Pandora, written by the ruthless Captain
Edwards whose lost ship sank on Australia's
Barrier Reef with many of the captured muti-
neers still in chains; and the log of George
Hamilton, Pandora's surgeon. The final chapter
is drawn from Captain Beechey's log of HMS
Blossom, which in 1825 was the first Royal
Navy ship to make contact with the last surviv-
ing mutineer, John Adams, and the descen-
dants of the other mutineers on Pitcairn Island.

McKinney wisely discounts a further
account written by John Fryer, the
master of the Bounty, due to the
man's incompetence and personal bitterness
toward Bligh. McKinney's counterpoint to
Bligh's log comes from the journal of James
Morrison, Bounty's extraordinarily articulate
boatswain's mate who was one of the muti-
neers who stayed in Tahiti and was captured
by HMS Pandora. Morrison was subsequently
condemned to death by court-martial and
then pardoned. One particularly fascinating
passage deals with how the Christian family,
who were influential lawyers, manipulated
the press to dishonor Bligh and recast Fletcher
as a noble victim.

For all its authenticity and attention to
detail, McKinney's book is no less riveting. It
is one of the finest and most exciting sea
stories ever told by an extraordinarily articu-
late author. The book is in very clear type,
making it easily readable. The afterword
explains the fates of many of the players in
the story, and the appendices provide useful
background on the chronology and Royal
Navy practices and regulations. If I were to
find a fault with the book, it is with the book's
artwork which smacks of the "Boy's Own"

style of illustration common in lighter text-
books and adventure stories published in the
1950s and earlier.

I read this book on a ship steaming from
Tahiti to Pitcairn Island in November, 1989. I
could think of no better preparation for visiting
that extraordinary place than McKinney's
Bligh.

—Paul Dudley Hart
Director

Industrial and International Programs

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Woods Hole, Massachusetts

Biological Oceanography — An Early History,
1870-1960 by Eric Mills. 1989. Cornell Uni-
versity Press, New York, NY. 378 pp. + xvii.
$47.95.

Biological Oceanography — An Early History,
1870-1960 is a narrative about life in the sea, a
chronicle of ideas, and the story of the men and
women who first studied the productivity of
life in the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean.
Mills relates how the initial study of plankton

Tracers in the Ocean

Edited by H. Charnock, J. E. Lovelock,
P. S. Lfss, and M. Whitfield

Trace elements have been used to improve
understanding of ocean currents and the mixing
of the oceans; the behavior of trace elements in
biological and inorganic systems and processes;
and the carbon cycle, climate change, and the
greenhouse effect. These papers present these
techniques and results for researchers in ocean-
ography and related fields.
Paper. $19.95 ISBN 0-691-02443-X
Cloth: $50.00 ISBN 0-691-08571-4
AT YOUR BOOKSTORE OR

| Princeton University Press

L| |f/ 41 WIUJAM ST. • PRINCETON. NJ 08540 • (609) 258-4900
ORDERS 800-PRS-ISBN (777-4726)

ARD

Don't

DIVERS ALERT
NETWORK

PREPARED MEMBERSHIP PROVIDES:

•Diver's Medical Insurance
$15,000 of coverage
•Safe Diver Info Kit
• Alert Diver •• DAN's Newsletter

For more information or to join

1-800-446-2671

or write

D.A.N., Box 3823, DUMC, Durham, NC 27710

distribution patterns led quite naturally to the
investigation of the chemical, physiological,
and ecological processes that explain the
observed patterns of plant and animal life in
the sea.

The account begins during the last quarter
of the 19th century in Kiel, Germany,
with the physiologist Victor Hensen.
To him, phytoplankton was "this blood of the
sea" — a metaphor conveying his view that
the ocean was a superorganism that could be
studied in an analytical, fully quantitative
way, even as physiologists examine and under-
stand the internal processes of other living
organisms.

This concept was an extraordinary one, a
marked departure from the phylogenetic
speculation, descriptive biology, and biogeo-
graphy that had prevailed until that time. It
was Hensen's opinion that the emphasis was to
be "replaced in practice and in thinking by
attempts to link quantitatively the production
of organisms to their chemical and physiologi-
cal surroundings." The object was to be no less
than "an estimate of marine production that
would allow the abundance of fishes to be
calculated or predicted"- —a goal as elusive then
as it remains today.

Mills describes the scientific questions, the
milieu, and circumstances that led to the
remarkable results of the "Kiel School"-
Hensen, Karl Brandt, Hans Lohman, and
others — from Hensen's days until its decline
after 1912 and eventual end in the 1920s. "At
various times Prussian imperialism, agricul-
tural chemistry, microbiology, the problems of
German universities, failure of the commercial
fisheries, the development of analytical chemis-
try, the establishment of international scientific
organizations, and sheer scientific curiosity
played their roles" in determining the course of
events. Mills concludes, "the decline and
demise of the Kiel School . . . may be accounted
for nearly entirely by institutional factors,
particularly the inflexibility of the German
academic system . . . [and] to the lack of career
opportunities," rather than the "exhaustion of
ideas." Mills convincingly shows that during
its relatively short life, the Kiel School pro-
duced the basis from which ultimately stems
almost all present understanding of the cycle of
plankton productivity in the ocean.

The narrative moves from Kiel to Ply-
mouth, England, and to the work of E. J. Allen,
W. R. G. Atkins, H. W. Harvey, L. H. N.
Cooper, Sheina Marshall, A. P. Orr and Marie
V. Lebour. Except for the latter three, they
were trained primarily as inorganic chemists.
The research of this talented group, precari-
ously financed mainly by government grants,
was to directly influence research in America,
largely through their contributions published
in the Journal of the Marine Biological Associa-
tion, U.K.

At Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in the mid-
1950s, Alfred C. Redfield, Bostwick Ketchum,
and John Ryther were in various ways mark-
edly influenced by the Plymouth investiga-
tions, and Harvey's volume, The Chemistry and
Fertility of Seawaters, appeared on almost every
biologist's bookshelf. But it was one of G.
Evelyn Hutchinson's students at Yale, Gordon
Riley, who most prominently provided the link
between Plymouth and Woods Hole and the
next step in the study of productivity of the
ocean.

Riley's mathematical and analytical
approach was regarded at the time by
many ecologists as arcane and largely
inscrutable. It started with multiple correla-
tions, but when these failed, led to a collabora-
tion with Henry Stommel, then a young, newly
employed physical oceanographer at the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Riley
also used the Atlantis, then the principal seago-
ing vessel at Woods Hole, to collect data to use
in his models. With the help of Stommel, Riley
included for the first time the role of vertical
eddy diffusion on the distribution of nutrients
as well as the phytoplankton itself. Along with
such physical considerations they incorporated
quantitative measurements of grazing by
zooplankton, following the original work of
Marshall and Orr.

At this point, history begins to overlap
with the near present; indeed, some of the
principals are still living in retirement at
Woods Hole or elsewhere. This book does
more than just record discoveries as they
occurred: it deals in considerable detail with
the biological concepts involved, and there are
many. It also demonstrates once more that
because knowledge — and science in particu-
lar— is empowering, it necessarily must be

political. This has always been so, not only in
the 19th and 20th centuries, but as far back in
history as one cares to delve.

In a sense, Mills' s book is idiosyncratic in
dealing only with plankton productivity, all the
more remarkable as his own early research
dealt largely with the systematics of deep-sea
amphipods. He has justified this omission by
observing that "deep-sea biology [of the
benthos], which flourished before the turn of
the century, became a side issue (if it were
carried on at all), a specialized, difficult, and
even scientifically uninteresting residuum of
19th century thought."

But times have changed and it was pre-
cisely in the early 1960s that the deep-sea
benthos again gained prominence. Meanwhile,
the reader will find nothing in this volume
about the resurgence of deep-sea biology that
had begun in the 1940s and '50s with the
Swedish deep-sea and Galathea Expeditions.

To the historian this book will be interest-
ing because it brings into focus bureaucracy
and politics and their effects on marine science;
to the biologist it brings an understanding of
the origin of ideas. Eric Mills has written a

scholarly work that is fun to read. That surely
is an accomplishment!

—Rudolf S. Scheltema

Senior Scientist, Biology Department

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Woods Hole, Massachusetts

EXTRA LONG 7 FT.

UNDERWATER
TELESCOPE

• Disassembles For Storage

• 1.33X Magnification In Water

• Right Angle Or Straight Thru View

• Waterproof System

• Precision Coated Glass Optics

Our new deluxe hydroscope offers
extended range underwater (submer-
sible up to 6 feet) and larger optics for
more light gathering ability. Ideal for
remote viewing applications in indus-
try surveillance and underwater study
Popular with Coast Guard and Cus-
toms Inspectors searching for hidden
contraband. Security officers utilize
the hydroscope to search for car
bombs. Boat yards find them ideal
to inspect propellers and underwater
surfaces. Four models are available
from $160 to $1375.

Write today for complete specifications
and our FREE 172 page catalog.

A A Tel (609) 573-6250
!••• Serving Industry Since 1942

Edmund Scientific Co.

Dept 10B1. N963
Edscorp Bldg., Barnngton, NJ 08007

The International Ocean Technology Congress

is organizing a

Special Conference on Ocean Resource Development

This conference will be hosted by the Strathclyde Regional Council in
Glasgow, Scotland • June 18 - 20, 1991

The goals of the conference are to further the development of ocean space and ocean resources.
Theme areas include:

• Renewable Energy Resources (wave, tidal, OTEC)

• Living Resources (Fisheries, Aquaculture, Biotechnology)

• Ocean Space Utilization and Transportation (large stable ocean

platforms and transportation systems)

• Waste Management (municipal, industrial, dredging and nuclear)

• Environmental Assessment Technologies

Abstracts are due by 16 October 1990 and should be sent to :

Ms. Claire Bowie

Tait & McLay

9 Royal Crest, Glasgow, Scotland G3 7SP
FAX 04 1-332-0294

BOOKS RECEIVED

BIOLOGY

The Natural History of Seals by

W. Nigel Bonner. 1990. Facts
On File, New York, NY. 196 pp.
+ xvi. $24.95.

ENVIRONMENT

Aquatic Oligochaete Biology IV

edited by J. L. Kaster. 1989.
Kluwer Academic Publishers,
Norwell,MA. 252pp. $125.00.

The Bottlenose Dolphin by

Stephen Leatherwood and
Randall R. Reeves. 1990.
Academic Press, San Diego, CA.
653pp. $90.00.

Pacific Coast Inshore Fishes,
Third Edition by Daniel W.
Gotshall. 1989. Sea Challengers,
Monterey, CA. 97pp. $18.95.

Voyaging to the Whales by Hal

Whitehead. 1989. Stoddart
Publishing, Toronto, Canada.
195 pp. + xii. $28.95.

STATEMENT Of OWNERSHIP. MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION

QUARTERLY

3A No of itauei Published

0 0 I 2 I 9 8 1 8 2 9/29/89

Complete Ma.l.ng Address of Known OMice of Publication iSt'W Cm Counn, Stun ami ZJP + 4 Cadn

9 MAURY LANE, WOODS HOLE, MA 02543-9985

38 Annuil Subtcnbtion Pr,ct
$22.00

e Mailing AijQiess of ihs Hea

{same as above)

WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION

PAUL R. RYAN, OCEANUS, 9 MAURY LN., MOODS HOLE, MA 02543-9985

q Editor l:\umrun.

(none)

•-. 'fa] i.

tu'unj ..< .•,,.. I; nut .,~nrj h, ,i , , 117... f ji
1/1 nu"\r anj uM'eii ,11 -^tll j\ tfiul ,<!
lalrJ I i/irm /nun t>r • umplrird 1

Hole Oceanographic Institution

Complaio Mailing Addre:

Woods Hole, MA UJb4J

Complete Wailing Address

HHas Nol Changes During
Preceding 12 Monihi

A Total No Cooie

B Paid anfl.'o' Requested Ci
1 Sales through dealers

vendors and counter sales

2 Mail Subscnoiion

' 1081 aid 10811

D Free Distribution by Mail Carrier or Other MeB

15,000

3,000

15,000

11,500

14,500

14,580

E ToUl Distribution /S*m of C and 01

14,900

14,880

100

G TOTAL (Sum •'/ £ Fl anj 2-thoulJ e

15,000

I certify that the statements made by
me above are correct and complete

5.^*1 iff nP^J'ti* of Edi^kK.^; '

PS Form 3526. Ffh 1<W

Global Change and Our
Common Future edited by Ruth
S. Defries and Thomas F.
Malone. 1989. National
Academy Press, Washington,
DC. 227 pp. + xiv. $24.00.

The Global Ecology Handbook:
What You Can Do About the
Environmental Crisis edited by
Walter H. Corson. 1990. Beacon
Press, Boston, MA. 414 pp. +
xviii. $16.95.

The Greenhouse Trap: What
We're Doing to the Atmosphere
and How We Can Slow Global
Warming by Francesca Lyman.
1990. Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
190 pp. + xviii. $9.95.

Loss of Biological Diversity: A
Global Crisis Requiring Inter-
national Solutions edited by
Craig C. Black. 1989. National
Science Foundation, Washing-
ton, DC. 19 pp. + vii. Free.

Marine Pollution, Second
edition by R. B. Clark. 1989.
Oxford University Press, New
York,N.Y. 220pp. $60.00.

The Complete Guide to Envi-
ronmental Careers by Lee P.
DeAngelis, Stephen C. Easier,
and Loren E. Yeager. 1989.
Island Press, Covelo, CA. 328
pp. + xvi. $14.95.

Attention

Students & Teachers!

Oceanus is available to you
at reduced rates! Student

subscriptions and those for

classroom adoption cost

only $20.

For teachers, we offer a

25-percent discount on

orders of five or more.

Oceanus can make a great

teaching tool to aid in your

classroom curriculum.

For more information,

contact the Oceanus

editorial offices.

Stolt-Nielsen

Spanning the Seas.
Serving the World.

Stolt-Nielsen Inc.

8 Sound Shore Drive
Post Office Box 2300
Greenwich, CT 06836
(203) 625-9400

SHIPWRECK OR
SUBMERGED TARGET

The Towed
Survey
System
is ready
to work
for you:

LOCATE,

IDENTIFY,

AND SURVEY

• Proven Worldwide Performance

Arctic to South Pacific

• Complete Services

Side-scan sonar, long-range
scanning sonar (C.T.F.M) towed
survey sled with tethered ROV
system.

• Our Customers Include:
Insurance, salvage, military,
scientific, motion picture and
commercial organizations.

P.O. Box 622. Falmouth.MA 0254 1
Tel. 508-540-6 732 FAX 508-457-9680

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF CTD ACCURACY

salinity [PSU]

34.2OO 34.31O

The ocean is nol a stirred bath.

Performance in a calibration laboratory's static
environment has little meaning if a CTD lacks the
dynamic accuracy needed lo characterize the ocean.

The Sea-Bird CTD's new 'TC Ducted Flo*'
configuration offers unequalled dynamic
performance lo complement ils unprecedented
history of documented static accuracy and stability.

.-1 I i i_i. i. J

e.ioo
temperature

-I

Write or call for further information on the 'TC Ducted Flow' feature which is available at
modest cost as an option on new Sea-Bird CTD systems or as a field-retrofit to existing units.

Sea-Bird Electronics, Inc. 1808-136th Place NE, Bellevue, Washington 98005, USA
Telephone: (206) 643-9866 • Telex: 292915 SBEIUR • Telefax: (206) 643-9954

Marlin Offshore, Inc.

508-564-5406

Oceanograpbic Support Services

100' x 24' x 8' Steel, Twin screw, USCCi Inspected Vessel for charter

MARINE POLICY

The Age of the Arctic: Hot
Conflicts and Cold Relations by

Gail Osherenko and Oran R.
Young. 1989. Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, New York, NY. 316 pp
+ xvi. $59.50.

Management of World Fisheries:
Implications of Extended Coastal
State Jurisdiction edited by
Edward L. Miles. 318 pp. + xiv.
$30.00.

Managing Coastal Erosion.

1990. National Academy Press,
Washington, DC. 125 pp + x.

$24.50.

custom flags; burgees,
private signals

2828 canon street
sandiego, calif. 92106
tel: 61 9 224-81 18

Managing Troubled Waters: The
Role of Environmental Monitor-
ing edited by Sheila A. Mulvhill.
1990. National Academy Press,
Washington, DC. 125 pp + x.
$24.50.

The Ocean in Human Affairs

edited by S. Fred Singer. 1990.
International Conference on the
Unity of the Sciences, New York,
NY. 374pp. $34.95.

Oceans of Wealth? edited by K. R.
McKinnon. 1989. Australian
Government Publishing Service,
Canberra, Australia. 188 pp. + xx.
$29.95.

OCEANOGRAPHY

Shore Ecology of the Gulf of
Mexico by Joseph C. Britton and
Brian Morton. 1989. University of
Texas Press, Austin, TX. 387 pp.
+ vii. $22.50.

Tracers in the Ocean edited by H.
Charnock, J. E. Lovelock, P. S. Liss,
and M. Whitfield. 1990. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ.
236pp. $19.95.

SHIPS AND SAILING

The Atlantic Crossing Guide,
Second Edition edited by Philip
Allen. 1989. International Marine
Publishing, Camden, ME. 278 pp.
-t-xviii. $32.95.

Great American Lighthouses by

F. Ross Holland, Jr. 1989.
Preservation Press. Washington,
DC. 346pp. $16.95

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Oceans: Crewing Around the
World by Alison Muir Bennett
and Clare Davis. 1990. Seven
Seas Press, Camden, ME. 104pp.
+ vii. $10.95.

The Naval Strategy of the World

War by Vice Admiral Wolfgang
Wegener, translated by Holger H.
Herwig. 1989. Naval Institute
Press, Annapolis, MD. 231 pp.

+ lvi. $27.95.

The Perfect Gift

Give the gift of the

oceans to someone you

love.

A gift subscription to

Oceanus is the perfect

gift.. .the gift of

knowledge.

Use the tear-out card in
the front of this issue, or
write to the Oceanus
Subscriber Service Cen-
ter listed in the front of this
issue.

Give

Gift

of the

Sea

1930

come
aboard
yourself

now

Oceanus

The International Magazine
of Marine Science and Policy

Published by Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution

Foreign Subscription Order Form: Outside U.S. & Canada*

Please make cheques payable to Cambridge University Press

D one year at £22.00

Library or Institution:
D one year at £40.00
D payment enclosed.

(we require prepayment)

Please send MY Subscription to:

Please send a GIFT Subscription to:

Name

(please print)

Name

(please print)

Street address

City

State

Z'P

•U.S. and Canadian subscribers please use form inserted at
front of issue.

City

Donor's Name
Address _.

State

6/90

o c*

• DSVAlvin: 25 Years of Discovery,

Vol. 3 1 :4, Winter 1 988/89 — A review of the history and contributions ofDSV

Alvm.

• Sea Grant Issue,

Vol. 31:3, Fall 1 988 — Covers activities from biotechnology to estuary rehabili-
tation.

• U.S. Marine Sanctuaries,

Vol. 3 1 : 1 , Spring 1 988 — Features all the operating, and various proposed, sites.

• Carribean Marine Science,

Vol. 30:4, Winter 1 987/88 — Biology, geology, resources, and human impacts.

Vol. 2»:2, Summer 1986 — Describes the world's largest coral reef system.

• Beaches, Bioluminescence, and Pollution,

Vol. 28:3, Fall 1985 — Science in Cuba, and Jacques Cousteau's turbosail vessel.

• The Oceans and National Security,

Vol. 28:2, Summer 1985 — The oceans from the viewpoint of the modern navy,
strategy, technology, weapons systems, and science.

• The Exclusive Economic Zone,

Vol. 27:4, Winter 1984/85— Options for the U.S. EEZ.

• Deep-Sea Hot Springs and Cold Seeps,

Vol. 27:3, Fall 1984 — A full report on vent science.

• Industry and the Oceans,

Vol. 27:1, Spring 1984 — The interaction of the oceans and industry.

Issues not listed here, including those published prior to 1977, are out of print.
They are available on microfilm through University Microfilm International,
300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106.

Back issues cost $7.00 each . There is a discount of 25% on orders of 5 or more. Orders
must be prepaid; make checks payable to W.H.O.I. Foreign orders must be accompa-
nied by a check payable to Oceanus for £5.50 per issue (or equivalent).

send orders to:

Oceanus Back Issues
Subscriber Service Center

P.O. Box 6419
Syracuse, NY 13217-6419

HAS THE SUBSCRIPTION COUPON BEEN DETACHED?

If someone else has
made use of the
coupon attached to
this card, you can still
subscribe. Just send a
cheque — £22 for
one year (four
issues) --to this
address:

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building
Shaftesbury Road
Cambridge CB2 2RU
England

Please make checks
payable to Woods
Hole Oceanographic
Institution

1930

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building
Shaftesbury Road
Cambridge CB2 2RU
England

J0 2828 canon street
jf sandiego, calif. 92106
^ tel: 61 9 224-81 18

+ vii. $22.50.

Tracers in the Ocean edited by H.
Charnock, J. E. Lovelock, P. S. Liss,
and M. Whitfield. 1990. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ.
236pp. $19.95.

A gift subscription to

Oceanus is the perfect

gift... the gift of

knowledge.

Use the tear-out card in
the front of this issue, or
write to the Oceanus
Subscriber Service Cen-
ter listed in the front of this

issue.

AdcCitionat'ReacCiny".

Issues of OCCCHIUS

The Mediterranean

Vol. 33: 1 , Spring 1 990 — Brings you the range of marine
science in the Med, from its geological formation to its
currents and formation of deep water-masses. Includes
biology, petroleum exploration, the battle to clean up pol-
lution, marine archaeology, the Jason Project, and Julia
Child's own recipe for Mediterranean Fish Stew.

Pacific Century, Dead Ahead!

Vol. 32:4, Winter 1989/90— A study of the political and
economic structure of the Pacific region with an eye toward
the future and the important role that this region will play
in the global economy. Piracy, Greenpeace in the Pacific,
and dolphins. First International Submarine Races and a
futuristic look at the Slocum Mission.

The Bismarck Saga and Ports & Harbors

Vol. 32:3, Fall 1989 — Highlights the little-known U.S. involvement in the heroic battle of 1941,

and addresses the question of whether the Bismarck was sunk or scuttled. Japanese port innovations,

Dutch successes, Third-World problems, and American plans are examined,

as are the longshoremen's history and waterfront renovation.

other available issues

• The Oceans and Global Warming,

Vol 32:2, Summer 1 989 — Ocean/atmosphere interactions. El Nino, rising sea
levels, Venus' "runaway" greenhouse effect, Jason project.

• Whither the Whales?,

Vol. 32:1, Spring 1989 — Cetacean research, intelligence, research and track-
ing; whaling and dolphins.

• DSVAlvin: 25 Years of Discovery,

Vol. 3 1 :4, Winter 1 988/89 — A review of the history and contributions ofDSV

Alvin.

• Sea Grant Issue,

Vol. 31:3, Fall 1 988 — Covers activities from biotechnology to estuary rehabili-

• U.S. Marine Sanctuaries,

Vol. 31:1, Spring 1 988 — Features all the operating, and various proposed, sites.

• Carribean Marine Science,

Vol. 30:4, Winter 1 987/88 — Biology, geology, resources, and human impacts.

• Galapagos Marine Resources Reserve,

Vol. 30:2, Summer 1987 — Legal, management, scientific, and history

• The Titanic Revisited,

Vol. 29:3, Fall 1986 — Radioactivity in the Irish Sea, ocean architecture, more.

• The Great Barrier Reefi Science & Management,

Vol. 29:2, Summer 1986 — Describes the world's largest coral reef system.

• Beaches, Bioluminescence, and Pollution,

Vol. 28:3, Fall 1985 — Science in Cuba, and Jacques Cousteau's turbosail vessel.

• The Oceans and National Security,

Vol. 28:2, Summer 1985 — The oceans from the viewpoint of the modern navy,
strategy, technology, weapons systems, and science.

• The Exclusive Economic Zone,

Vol. 27:4, Winter 1984/85— Options for the U.S. EEZ.

• Deep-Sea Hot Springs and Cold Seeps,

Vol. 27:3, Fall 1984 — A full report on vent science.

• Industry and the Oceans,

Vol. 27:1, Spring 1984 — The interaction of the oceans and industry.

send orders to:

Oceanus Back Issues
Subscriber Service Center

P.O. Box 6419
Syracuse, NY 13217-6419

MARINE AND

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
AND ENGINEERING

I he Florida Institute of
Technology is located on
* Florida's Space Coast, 40 miles
south of Kennedy Space Center. F.IX
is surrounded by a unique coastal
environment. Within easy bicycling
distance students can reach the beaches
of the Atlantic Ocean, estuaries and
marine wetlands, and any number of
lakes and artificial canals.

Students can also catch a boat bound
for the Gulf Stream at F.I.T.'s anchorage.

FL.

:*- :3~sp-

F.I.T. supports student research.
Through faculty sponsored research,
F.I.T. students use state-of-the-art
technical equipment and vessels.

MAJOR PROGRAM INTERESTS:

Biological Oceanography

Corrosion and Biofouling

Environmental Information and Synthesis

Freshwater/Lake Chemistry

Geological and Physical Oceanography

Global Environmental Processes

Hydrodynamics and Naval Architecture

Marine and Environmental Chemistry

Marine Composite Materials

Marine Education

Marine Fisheries

Marine Waste Management

Ocean Policy and Management

Pollution Processes and Toxicology

Waste Utilization and Management

Wetlands Systems

THE DISCIPLINES:

Coastal Processes and Engineering

Coastal Zone Management

Environmental Science and Engineering

Marine Vehicles

Ocean Engineering

Ocean Systems

Oceanography

For more information about degree programs in Marine and Environmental Science and Engineering,

including financial support and tuition remission, contact:
Dr. N. Thomas Stephens, Head, Department of Oceanography and Ocean Engineering

j§ Florida Institute of Technology

A Distinctive Independent University

150 West University Boulevard, Melbourne, FL 32901-6988 • Telephone (407) 678-8000 ext. 8096 • FAX (407) 984-8461

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Oceanus"

See other formats