Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: Cape Codders protest offshore wind plans as Gov. Healey visits Barnstable ice cream shop

August 16, 2024 — Opponents of landing more offshore wind cables in Barnstable got a chance to confront Gov. Maura Healey on Wednesday when she visited Cape Cod.

Members of the community groups Barnstable Speaks and Save Dowses Beach protested across the street from Four Seas ice cream in Centerville, where Healey stopped to promote the new Massachusetts Ice Cream Trail.

About 25 protesters held signs and chanted, “Protect our beaches. Say no to Avangrid.” They waited outside as the governor went in, greeted the staff, and tried the mint chip ice cream.

Read the full article at CAI

Using Environmental DNA to Understand Biodiversity in a Marine National Monument

August 16, 2024 — When I tell my friends that I’m going to collect environmental DNA samples in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, their first question is always: Where is that?

Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National is a highly protected area located about 130 miles east-southeast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It is similar in size to Connecticut. President Obama designated this area as the first marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean in 2016.

NOAA shares management responsibilities with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for activities and species within the monument. It is a relatively undisturbed environment, which could be called a true ocean wilderness. The chief scientist of this research expedition, Peter Auster, is a research professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut and a senior research scientist at Mystic Aquarium. When Peter asked me if I’d be interested in sailing together to collect environmental DNA samples from the monument, I answered with an enthusiastic yes.

An interdisciplinary research group mustered aboard R/V Connecticut. Peter Auster and others scuba dove to deploy baited remote underwater video cameras to study apex predators. Meta Miner and Mael Glon from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducted seabird surveys. Mary Beth Decker of Yale University used a specialized net to collect and identify gelatinous animals.

And of course, I collected seawater samples for eDNA metabarcoding analysis to study biodiversity in the monument, including fish and marine mammals.

Besides the fascinating habitat we studied, this expedition offered unique research opportunities for me.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries 

MASSACHUSETTS: Can crawler robots, fiberoptic sensors prevent the next break?

August 13, 2024 — A month after a football field-sized blade on Vineyard Wind turbine AW-38 folded over and began breaking apart into the ocean, the company and blade manufacturer GE Vernova are continuing work to remove its remnants and to respond to floating and washed-up debris around the region — including the Islands and Cape Cod.

Over the weekend, an outline of the blade incident report and action plan was also released.

The latest detachment of blade portions still hanging from the turbine occurred on Sunday morning, and Nantucket officials issued an advisory Sunday night about the potential for more debris coming ashore there, depending on wind direction.

Sunday’s “controlled detachment” followed a series of adjustments to the blade’s position completed at the end of last week, which, in combination with winds from the remnants of Hurricane Debby, “led to the safe separation of the sections below the root of the blade,” according to Nantucket officials.

Read the full article at The Herald News

MASSACHUSETTS: Crews try to take down rest of broken blade from wind turbine incident on Nantucket

August 9, 2024 — The company responsible for a broken wind turbine blade that sent six to seven truckloads of debris into the water off of Nantucket hopes to remove the rest of the broken blade Thursday.

GE Vernova, the company that manufactured the blade said it’s worried high winds from Tropical Storm Debby could send the remaining pieces of the broken blade into the ocean.

Wednesday night Federal and State officials met with the Nantucket Select Board to discuss the incident. The broken turbine is part of the Vineyard Wind Project, which began to break apart in early July, shortly after that residents of Cape Cod and the Islands started finding heaps of fiberglass washed up on the shorelines.

Read the full article at Boston 25

MASSACHUSETTS: Vineyard Wind turbine debris makes it to Cape Cod

August 7, 2024 — Debris from the failed Vineyard Wind Turbine has washed ashore in Falmouth, town officials said, weeks after a blade broke off and fell into the ocean.

The turbine, manufactured by GE Vernova and part of the Vineyard Wind project, failed on July 13. The debris has scattered across nearby beaches, angering residents on Nantucket.

A preliminary investigation by GE found that the failure was due to a manufacturing deviation.

In a statement, Falmouth says it found what they believe to be wind turbine debris in the water and on the shoreline at Black Beach, Cahpoquoit Beach, Woodneck Beach, and Old Silver Beach.

Read the full article at Boston.com

MAINE: Failure of wind turbine blade off Cape Cod raises questions for Maine officials

August 6, 2024 — The collapse of a wind energy turbine blade off Massachusetts in mid-July exposed a weakness in communications about environmental and mechanical hazards, raising an issue that Maine may have to address as it plans its own wind power presence in the Gulf of Maine.

Debris from the broken turbine blade, about 350 feet long and manufactured by GE Vernova, washed up on Nantucket beaches. Residents posted photos of fiberglass and foam littering the tony island’s beaches. The online images sparked a tug-of-war between environmentalists who said the incident should not set back efforts to promote zero-carbon energy and skeptics who said the incident proves that wind energy can pollute the environment.

“Obviously, it’s not great,” said Jack Shapiro, climate and clean energy director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine. But busted wind turbines washing up on beaches is far less damaging than oil from broken tankers or off-shore drilling sites, he said.

“The most concerning thing for Nantucket was the delayed direct notification to our community,” Brooke Mohr, chair of the town’s select board, said in a recent interview.

Vineyard Wind, the developer of New England’s first utility-scale offshore wind project, informed the town at 5 p.m. July 15, two days after the incident, she said. Vineyard Wind did not respond to an email seeking comment on Mohr’s account.

Read the full article at Yahoo! News

Cape Cod’s Coral Gardens (Yes, We Have Corals Here) Are in Trouble

July 25, 2024 — If you were to picture coral right now, your mind’s eye would surely see tropical reefs with crystal-clear turquoise water. But that image is incomplete: the temperate seas around the world are full of corals clinging to the walls of trenches, rocky cliffs, and seamounts, and the waters around Cape Cod are no exception.

The deep waters of the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank are home to a vast array of corals. Previous research has revealed their diversity, ecological value, and adaptations. Now, a three-year-long National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) initiative is aiming to shed more light on these animals, which are facing a barrage of threats from human activity that could wipe them out before we even get a chance to understand them.

Read the full article at The Provincetown Independent 

MASSACHUSETTS: In a packed room in Eastham, residents call for ‘reset’ on Outer Cape offshore wind

July 22, 2024 — Outer Cape residents filled a hotel ballroom to capacity in Eastham Wednesday for a meeting on offshore wind development areas off Cape Cod’s eastern shore.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management hosted the information session in response to complaints that the agency has not done enough on the Outer Cape to communicate its plans. The agency has proposed eight areas for lease to developers, totaling nearly 1 million acres.

Among the concerned residents to speak were fishers, a charter boat owner, and Select Board members from at least five towns. Recurring themes included protecting Stellwagen Bank, the location of cable landings, and the role of offshore wind in reducing climate change.

Federal plans show offshore wind areas in the Gulf of Maine starting about 25 miles off Cape Cod.

Luke Feinberg, a project coordinator with BOEM, told the audience the agency does not anticipate that electrical cables would make landfall on the Outer Cape because the area does not have the infrastructure or electrical demand to support it. The closest grid connections BOEM has analyzed are in Sandwich and Plymouth.

“Just want to be very clear, that as we predict today, cables would not be landing in the Outer Cape area or going through the Outer Cape area,” he said.

Read the full article at CAI

Cape Cod scientists want to dump 60,000+ gallons of sodium hydroxide into ocean in climate change experiment

July 16, 2024 — Environmentalists and fishermen are pushing back against a plan from a group of scientists who want to dump more than 60,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide, more commonly known as lye, into the ocean off Cape Cod to gain an understanding of how to slow climate change.

Scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Falmouth are seeking a federal permit for their project, which would start sometime this summer with a field trial program that would disperse roughly 6,600 gallons 10 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard.

Woods Hole says there are two central goals to its so-called LOC-NESS project, short for “Locking away Ocean Carbon in the Northeast Shelf and Slope.”

The first is to “understand potential environmental impacts of using ocean alkalinity enhancement to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.” The other is to “verify and report the amount of carbon dioxide this method might realistically remove if deployed at scale.”

“While emission reductions are key to minimizing human impact on Earth’s climate, it has become clear in recent years that drastic emission reductions must be supplemented by efforts to actively remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” Woods Hole scientists wrote in their application to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Environmentalists and fishermen are not taking kindly to the proposed experiment which would continue next summer at a more drastic scale of roughly 60,000 gallons in the waters northeast of Provincetown, in the Gulf of Maine.

Read the full article at the Boston Herald

Scientists plan climate engineering experiment in ocean off Cape Cod

July 11, 2024 — Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are seeking a federal permit to experiment in the waters off Cape Cod and see if tweaking the ocean’s chemistry could help slow climate change.

If the project moves forward, it will likely be the first ocean field test of this technology in the U.S. But the plan faces resistance from both environmentalists and the commercial fishing industry.

The scientists want to disperse 6,600 gallons of sodium hydroxide — a strong base — into the ocean about 10 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard. The process, called ocean alkalinity enhancement or OAE, should temporarily increase that patch of water’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the air. This first phase of the project, targeted for early fall, will test chemical changes to the seawater, diffusion of the chemical and effects on the ecosystem.

If successful, the team plans to conduct a larger trial next year in the Gulf of Maine.

Dan McCorkle, co-principal investigator of the project and a recently retired Woods Hole researcher, said the team chose a part of ocean that would minimize impact on marine life, and that they will stop the release of sodium hydroxide if marine mammals are present. The chemical will likely be detectable in an area a couple miles in diameter and should dissipate within five days.

Read the full article at wbur