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6/4/14

Construction is well underway on a $1 million project to install an eco-groovy storm drain system in the seaside village.

The project is resulting in temporary road closures, detours and one-way traffic with flaggers on the city’s main drag – Trinity Street – as well as Ocean Avenue and West Street.

The construction comes just as the city and its businesses brace for the start of the tourist season. While some may lament the timing, there’s a good reason construction is scheduled for the summer – it’s the only time such a project can be done.

City engineer Steve Allen of GHD explained that the removal of the existing drainage system and installation of the new one can only happen during the dry season.

The project is intended to cleanse the city’s stormwater runoff and keep pollution out of Trinidad Bay, which has been deemed an Area of Special Biological Significance by the state. That designation helped  the city obtain a Prop. 84 grant from the state to pay for the drainage improvements.

Trinidad’s stormwater now flows unimpeded through pipes and ditches, empyting into the bay at the boat ramp near Trinidad Pier.

The project involves installation of new underground drain pipes on Trinity Street from Trinidad School to an area just short of West Avenue, along Ocean Avenue and West Avenue.

Large underground infiltration chambers will be located on Trinity Street in front of the school, on Ocean Avenue and on West Avenue. The chambers contain a series of pipes which hold the stormwater and allow it to soak into the ground.

Along Ocean Avenue, “bioswales” will be installed on the side of the road. The swales are designed to allow water to flow through vegetation, then soak into the ground. The gently sloping swales double as parking spaces.

Construction is expected to be completed by mid-October. Other portions of Trinidad’s drainage system may be improved in the future when funding becomes available.

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Inaugural event this summer to raise money for Northcoast Marine Mammal Center

5/29/14

An open-water swimmer has found a way to connect her pas­sion for swimming and commu­nity outreach by creating the Hum­boldt Bay Critter Crawl — a 4.5­mile open water swim from Coast Guard Station Humboldt Bay to Woodley Island Marina on July 13.

“We’re looking for swimmers that are experienced in open wa­ter swimming, because tempera­tures can hover around 50 to 60 de­grees on average and can change throughout the swim,” said event organizer Sarah Green. “I think it’s appropriate that our inau­gural swim is to help benefit the Northcoast Marine Mammal Cen­ter and the elephant seal pups be­cause they inhabit the waters we swim in. There are a lot of things that make this timely in support­ing the center.”

Green said the Humboldt Bay Harbor District will provide a boat to help with traffic in the water, and a kayaker will be alongside every swimmer to make sure there are no problems and give them food or fluids during the swim.

“The biggest risks to swim­mers in the bay environment are motorized boats and hypother­mia,” Green said. “People don’t think about getting dehydrated in the water, but you do. This is a cur­rent- assisted swim, so we are an­ticipating that the swim will take most swimmers one to two hours to complete depending on their swim speed, water temperature, and the strength of the current on that day.”

Green started a Facebook page called “Humboldt Bay Critter Crawl” last week, and there are al­ready three swimmers so far.

“If people want to participate, they can contact me through the Facebook page or at the Healing Spirit Wellness Center, mainly be­cause I want to talk to them and get an idea of their experience.”

Other ways to participate in­clude donating, either from indi­viduals or businesses, or just com­ing out on the day of the event. All donations will go directly to the Northcoast Marine Mammal Cen­ter, she said.

Green and her partner, Bill, have been swimming in the bay for the past few years but realize that not a lot of people swim in it. So, she thought the Critter Crawl would not only bring attention to the help the center, but also encourage peo­ple to swim in the bay.

“It’s something that’s becoming more popular,” Green said. “I re­alize the colder water isn’t for everyone, but it’s a great resource we have (and) open water swimming is a great way to stay healthy.”

For more info, visit http://www.humboldtbaycrittercrawl.com/

Like the Critter Crawl on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/humoldtbaycrittercrawl

Click HERE to donate to the Critter Crawl

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National study seeks to prepare West Coast for future disasters

5/25/14

A group of Humboldt State University researchers and graduate students aided in the discovery of the first tactile evidence of a historic tsunami at Half Moon Bay as part of a national study aimed at increasing the state's understanding and defenses against the aqueous natural disaster.

HSU Geology Department research associate and principal investigator Eileen Hemphill-Haley, along with research associate Harvey Kelsey and a team of students, took part in the study that searched for traces of past tsunamis in the sediment at 20 coastal sites stretching from Crescent City to the Tijuana River.

Hemphill-Haley said the sites were chosen based off a computer model created by the study's other contributors: the U.S. Geological Survey's Science Application for Risk Reduction team, the California Geological Survey, the California Governor's Office of Emergency Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"We started by looking at the results of the modeling to see that if there was a large earthquake in the Aleutian Islands, where would high water heights be along the California coast," she said. "If you look along the whole coast, it didn't have a consistent water height level, which is based on the consistency of the shore. We focused in on the places where the model said had the highest water levels."

Of the sites examined, only two yielded any evidence, which Hemphill-Haley said is indicative of the mixed composition of the coastline.

"If the tsunami came and hit a rocky coastline, over time you wouldn't find the evidence of it," she said. "We looked for areas where there would be low lying wetlands and marshes along the coast. You need the right type of depositional setting to preserve a tsunami deposit on our coast. We just didn't find a smoking gun anywhere else."

In the northern portion of Half Moon Bay, the research crew discovered the first evidence of the 1946 tsunami that killed one person walking on the beach and wrecked fishing boats. The tsunami resulted from a magnitude 8.1 earthquake on the Aleutian Islands that occurred on April 1, 1946, killing 159 people and caused $26 million in property damage in Hilo, Hawaii, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

As to how they could tell the sediment was from that particular tsunami, the researchers used a variety of techniques including carbon dating, researching historic records and reconnaissance work.

HSU Geology Department graduate student Casey Loofbourrow was one the students who participated in the field studies.

"We'd go around and poke holes in the ground with this device, which goes down 2 meters," he said. "Then, we'd clean off the core and describe the sedimentary layers. When we find a good core, we package it up, and we do all kinds of stuff to it."

The sediment's location was also an indicator of potential tsunami debris.

"The type of material a tsunami would pick up is the same stuff a big storm would," she said. "What happens with a tsunami is that sediment would be transported farther inland. You look for more of a single, sheet-like deposit that you can trace a continuous distance inland. You have to have a very big tsunami to have it go that far."

For the Half Moon Bay event, Hemphill-Haley said the deposit they found stretched back about 1,000 feet.

"That place has been hit by a lot of storms, but you don't see a lot of those that far back," she said.

The researchers also found further evidence of the deadly 1964 Crescent City tsunami that killed over a dozen people. With a limited record of state tsunamis stretching back to the late 1700s, Hemphill-Haley said new data on distance sourced tsunamis — originating from far-away earthquakes — is necessary.

"The goal was to really get more baseline data to improve our understanding of tsunami hazards for the entire state and the types of earthquakes that could create these hazards," Hemphill-Haley said. "If there is a tsunami big enough to leave traces of a tsunami there before, you can think that same thing can happen again. The computer modeling can show what might be possible and whether there is a pattern of tsunamis at certain areas of the coast. All these bits of information start filling in some blank spots we didn't know before."

National Weather Service warning coordination meteorologist Troy Nicolini said that knowing where a tsunami are likely to hit based on where its earthquake originates gives coastal communities a better understanding of what they will be dealing with before the waves reach the shore.

"We don't want to evacuate a significantly large part of the population for every distance sourced earthquake," he said. "If we can increase our knowledge of how the earthquake in the Aleutians will impact us, we can help emergency managers do so for any given scenario. For quakes along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, we worry about taking action immediately. From far away, we have much more time — about four hours for Aleutian Island quakes."

Nicolini said the data gathered from this study is exactly what is needed to "refine" emergency responses along the state's coast.

The full study can be viewed online at http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2013/1170/

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New research from NOAA sounding alarm bells about climate change

5/1/14

In a troubling new discovery, scientists studying ocean waters off California, Oregon and Washington have found the first evidence that increasing acidity in the ocean is dissolving the shells of a key species of tiny sea creature at the base of the food chain.

The animals, a type of free-floating marine snail known as pteropods, are an important food source for salmon, herring, mackerel and other fish in the Pacific Ocean. Those fish are eaten not only by millions of people every year, but also by a wide variety of other sea crea­tures, from whales to dolphins to sea lions. Humboldt State University Oceanog­raphy Department Head Jeffrey Abell has conducted several studies on ocean acidification off the coast of Trinidad, most recently in 2010. Abell said that deeper ocean waters are usually more acidic due to bacteria digesting dead organism matter, called detritus, which floats to the ocean floors.

This digestion releases carbon dioxide, which reacts with water and causes the ocean to increase in acidity. Abell said Humboldt County’s shoreline is more prone to upwelling events in the late spring, which brings this deep, more acidic water to the surface.

“We don’t see a consistent exposure to acidic waters,” he said. “What we see is in the order of a few times to a dozen times a year during which the organisms, like pteropods, will be exposed to this corrosive water.”

Abell said Trinidad experienced about five of these events in 2007 — lasting no longer than a few days — but that number tripled to 15 episodes in 2010 that sometimes lasted over a week.

If the trend continues, climate change scien­tists say, it will imperil the ocean environment.

“These are alarm bells,”said Nina Bednarsek, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle who helped lead the research. “This study makes us understand that we have made an impact on the ocean environment to the extent where we can actually see the shells dissolving right now.”

Scientists from NOAA and Oregon State University found that in waters near the West Coast shoreline, 53 percent of the tiny floating snails had shells that were severely dissolving — double the estimate from 200 years ago.

Until now, the impact on marine species from increasing ocean acidity because of cli­mate change has been something that was tested in tanks in labs, but which was not con­sidered an immediate concern like forest fires and droughts.

The new study, published in the Proceed­ings of the Royal Society B, a scientific journal based in England, changes that.

“The pteropods are like the canary in the coal mine. If this is affecting them, it is affect­ing everything in the ocean at some level,” said one of the nation’s top marine biologists, Steve Palumbi, director of Stanford Universi­ty’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove.

The vast majority of the world’s scientists — including those at NOAA, NASA, the National Academy of Sciences and the World Meteorological Organization — say the Earth’s temperature is rising because of humans burning fossil fuels like oil and coal. That burning pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and traps heat, similar to a green­house. Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere have increased 25 per­cent since 1960 and are now at the highest levels in at least 800,000 years, according to measurements of air bubbles taken in ancient ice and other methods.

Many of the impacts are already being felt. Since the 1880s, when modern temperature records were first taken, the 10 hottest years have all occurred since 1998. Polar ice has melt­ed, forest fires are burning in the West with increasing frequency, and the ocean has risen 8 inches since 1900 at the Golden Gate Bridge.

But what many people do not realize is that nearly a third of carbon dioxide emitted by humans is dissolved in the oceans. Some of that forms carbonic acid, which makes the ocean more corrosive.

Over the past 200 years, the ocean’s acidity has risen by roughly 30 percent. At the pres­ent rate, it is on track to rise by 70 percent by 2050 from preindustrial levels.

More acidic water can harm oysters, clams, corals and other species that have calcium carbonate shells. Generally speaking, increas­ing the acidity by 50 percent from current lev­els is enough to kill some marine species, tests in labs have shown.

Coastal Seafoods manager Greg Dale said Humboldt County’s oyster industry has actual­ly thrived over the last two years, but rising ocean acidity is“something we watch carefully.”

“If this keeps going, and it means shutting ocean productivity, that’s when things get scary,” Dale said. “The ocean changes every year, but if you change the (acidity), you will lose a great deal.”

Abell said the current ocean acidification levels are not enough to harm the shells of oysters or abalone, which are made of calcite, but are enough to dissolve the shells of pteropods, which are made of aragonite.

“Pteropods are the most sensitive of this process; they’ll be kind of like an early warn­ing system,” Abell said.“The present school of thought is that 50 years from now is when we’ll have to worry about the more sturdy shellfish, such as abalone.”

The new research on the marine snails does not show that increasingly acidic water is killing all of them, particularly older snails. But it is causing their shells to dissolve, which can make them more vulnerable to disease, slow their ability to evade predators and reduce their reproductive rates, the researchers said.

Some of the corrosive water near the shore could be a result of other types of pollution, such as runoff from fertilizer and sewage, said Stanford’s Palumbi, who was not involved in the NOAA research. But because the study found rates of the snails’ shells dissolving in deep water, far from the shore, human-caused carbon dioxide is the prime suspect, he added.

If people reduce emissions of fossil fuels, cutting carbon dioxide levels in the decades ahead, the damage to the oceans can still be limited, he said.

“But if we keep on the emissions profile we have now, by 2100 the oceans will be so harmed it’s hard to imagine them coming back from that in anything less than thou­sands of years,” Palumbi said.

“We are in a century of choice,” he said.“We can choose the way we want it to go.”

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