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27,000 Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells in Gulf of Mexico Ignored by Government, Industry

An older nearshore wellhead is shown off the coast of California in this undated photo. In state waters, California has resealed scores of its abandoned wells since the 1980s, but in federal waters, the official policy is out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Neither industry nor government checks for leaks at the more than 27,000 oil and gas wells abandoned in the Gulf of Mexico since the late 1940s. Abandoned wells are known sometimes to fail both on land and offshore. It happens so often that a technical term has been coined for the repair job: "re-abandonment."  Photo: California State Lands Commission / The Associated Press

nola.com - Associated Press - July 7, 2010

More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one -- not industry, not government -- is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing.

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Study: Oceans Trapping Heat at Accelerating Rate

insidebayarea.com - by Seth Borenstein - January 18, 2016

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Nature Climate Change - Industrial-era global ocean heat uptake doubles in recent decades

WASHINGTON -- The amount of man-made heat energy absorbed by the seas has doubled since 1997, a study released Monday showed.

Scientists have long known that more than 90 percent of the heat energy from man-made global warming goes into the world's oceans instead of the ground.

And they've seen ocean heat content rise in recent years. But the new study, using ocean-observing data that goes back to the British research ship Challenger in the 1870s and including high-tech modern underwater monitors and computer models, tracked how much man-made heat has been buried in the oceans in the past 150 years.

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By 2050, There Will Be More Plastic than Fish in the World’s Oceans, Study Says

           

A September 2008 photo released by the Ocean Conservancy on March 10, 2009, shows a trash-covered beach in Manilla, Philippines. (Tamara Thoreson Pierce/Ocean Conservancy/AP)

CLICK HERE - REPORT - World Economic Forum - The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Independent study tallies 'true catch' of global fishing

washingtonpost.com - by Sarah Kaplan - January 20, 2016

There is a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans.

It coagulates into great floating “garbage patches” that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land. It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world’s sea turtles and nearly all of its marine birds, studies say . . .

. . . But that quantity pales in comparison with the amount that the World Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by the middle of the century.

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Why Some Scientists are Worried About a Surprisingly Cold ‘Blob’ in the North Atlantic Ocean

      

January–August 2015 Blended Land and Sea Surface Temperature Percentiles. (NOAA)

CLICK HERE - PAPER - Exceptional twentieth-century slowdown in Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation

washingtonpost.com - by Chris Mooney - September 24, 2015

. . . we learned from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the first eight months of 2015 were the hottest such stretch yet recorded for the globe’s surface land and oceans, based on temperature records going back to 1880. . . .

In the North Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland and Iceland, the ocean surface has seen very cold temperatures for the past eight months. . . .

. . . And while there may not yet be any scientific consensus on the matter, at least some scientists suspect that the cooling seen in these maps is no fluke but, rather, part of a process that has been long feared by climate researchers — the slowing of Atlantic Ocean circulation.

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Ebola crisis points to wider global threat on a par with al-Qaida, warns UK medic

THE GUARDIAN by Lisa O'Carroll                                                           March 27, 2015

Ebola should be seen as an early wake-up call to world leaders of the potential for an international health disaster in the same way that the 1998 US embassy bombings highlighted the possibility of further attacks by al-Qaida, a leading British medic in Sierra Leone has warned.

Dr Oliver Johnson has called for “a big political shakeup” at the World Health Organisation and says Britain’s Department for International Development must decide whether to “nationalise” aid and deploy the army the next time a humanitarian emergency hits.

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Doctors Who Treat Ebola Feel More Socially Isolated

LIVESCIENCE.COM   by Rachael Rettner                                                                         Feb. 13, 2015

Doctors who take care of very sick Ebola patients may feel socially isolated, but surprisingly, they may not feel more stressed than usual, a new study from Germany suggests.

Researchers surveyed 46 health care workers who treated Germany's first Ebola patient in August 2014, as well as 40 health care workers who worked in the same hospital but did not treat the Ebola patient.

The researchers who did the study hypothesized that the people who treated the Ebola patient would have more symptoms of psychological distress because they were working in a challenging environment that presented a risk that they could become infected with the deadly virus.

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Millions of Gallons of BP Oil Found on Ocean's Floor

      

Dr. Brian Stacy, NOAA veterinarian, prepares to clean an oiled Kemp's Ridley sea turtle found almost 40 miles from the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, June 14, 2010.
NOAA's National Ocean Service

CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - Using Natural Abundance Radiocarbon To Trace the Flux of Petrocarbon to the Seafloor Following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

digitaljournal.com - by Karen Graham - January 31, 2015

While Gulf Coast residents are feeling pretty good about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, thinking it's now less harmful than originally thought, scientists have found almost 10 million gallons of BP's oil, sitting on the bottom of the Gulf.

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Ebola in West Africa: 12 months on

WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION MEDIA CENTRE                   Jan, 15, 2015

One year after the first Ebola cases started to surface in Guinea, WHO is publishing this series of 14 papers that take an in-depth look at West Africa’s first epidemic of Ebola virus disease.

The papers explore reasons why the disease evaded detection for several months and the factors, many specific to West Africa, that fuelled its subsequent spread.

The most extensive papers trace events in each of the 3 most severely affected countries – Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone...

Key events are set out chronologically, starting with the child who is believed to be the index case of this epidemic through to the Director-General’s commitment to steadfastly support affected countries until they reach zero cases.

Read complete news release

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2015/ebola-one-year-on/en/
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Where Could Ebola Strike Next? Scientists Hunt Virus In Asia January 02, 2015

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO  by Michaeleen Doucleff              Jan. 2, 2015

...Scientists think bats likely triggered the entire Ebola epidemic in West Africa....

So now the big question is: Where else in the world is Ebola hiding out in bats? Where could the next big outbreak occur?

Ecologists found signs of Ebola in a Rousettus leschenaultii fruit bat. These bats are widespread across south Asia, from India to China. Kevin Olival/EcoHealth Alliance

.. ecologist Kevin Olival at EcoHealth Alliance in New York City... hunts down another virus in bats, called Nipah. In humans, it causes inflammation in the brain and comas....

Nipah has outbreaks every few years in Bangladesh. So Olival went there back in 2010 and captured a bunch of bats. Many had signs of Nipah in their blood. Others had something surprising: "There's antibodies to something related to Ebola Zaire."

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N.Y. doctor, free of Ebola, discharged from hospital

USA TODAY                                             Nov. 11, 2014
By Matthew Diebel, Doug Stanglin and Liz Szabo

NEW YORK — Craig Spencer, a New York doctor whose hospitalization for Ebola stirred fears that the disease might spread throughout Manhattan, was declared free of the virus Tuesday and released from the hospital...

Dr. Craig Spencer, center, is flanked by New York City Mayor Bill Bill de Blasio, left, and his wife Chirlane McCray as he leaves Bellevue Hospital after being declared free of the Ebola virus on Nov. 11 in New York. (Photo: Andrew Gombert, European Pressphoto Agency)

The release of the 33-year-old physician, who tested positive for the virus Oct. 23, means there are no longer any known Ebola cases being treated in the United States.

The volunteer with Doctors Without Borders, who contracted the disease while treating Ebola patients in Guinea in West Africa, said:

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