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Repost from @latimes
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L.A.’s devastating fires are only the latest episode in which the ocean has served as an unappreciated receptacle for trash and hazards originating on land.
The smoke from the fires, the debris piled up along decimated streets, the charred and toxic remnants of thousands of destroyed homes, businesses, cars and electronics — nearly all of it, eventually, will come to rest in the ocean.
Unlike the smoke that emanates from rural wildfires, the charred material now entering the ocean is the stuff of “people’s homes: their cars, their batteries, their electronics,” said Rasmus Swalethorp, a biological oceanographer at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It’s certainly going to contain a lot of things that we ideally don’t want to see in our oceans — and in our soils, for that matter, and our water streams, and certainly not on our dinner plates.”
Among scientists’ most immediate concerns is ocean water contamination. In addition to the already-massive footprint of ash offshore, Gold noted that runoff from the first few rainstorms is a huge concern. He’s had a flurry of conversations with city, county and state officials, who have been trying to proactively limit the amount of fire pollution going into the ocean.
The rain this week was the first significant precipitation in the region since May. In addition to the fires’ ash and chemical residue, it was also the first flush of nine months’ worth of daily pollution into the sea.
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📷 Wally Skalij; Rasmus Swalethorp/Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Robert Gauthier | Posted on 08/Feb/2025 09:08:39
