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Oil and water don't mix Many of us college-age people are old enough to remember the catastrophic environmental effects of the1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska. It taught us to hate oil, made countless young girls aspire to be marine biologists, and showed our quickly forming minds that there is truly nothing more painfully tear-jerking than the image of a sea otter covered in oil. But the shipping industry learned from their mistakes and shaped up their safety procedures, right? Well, maybe in North American waters. This past week, an oil tanker off the coast of Spain, the Prestige, encountered problems in rough conditions, ruptured, and began slowly spilling out the 77,000 tons of oil it was holding out of its aged hull. The waters near the Costa da Morte (unfortunately quite aptly named)serve as an important fishing area, and the nearby Spanish coast is home to 13 varieties of fragile ecosystems with numerous rare animal species. Things turned from bad to worse on Tuesday morning, when the tanker Prestige split down the middle, quickening flow of oil into the sea. Prestige was 150 miles out to sea when it finally succumbed, but environmental groups say it poses a threat even bigger than Exxon spill. They claim the effects will largely be dictated by the water temperatures and whether the oil solidifies before spreading towards the coast. As oil washes onto the Spanish coastline, the tragedy of the situation is compounded by the fact that the Russian-chartered Prestige, built in 1976, was one of the oldest oil tankers still sailing. Heightened regulations on oil shipping might have prevented the current spill. Out gazing, at stars. Hearing guitars. At approximately 5:00 AM Tuesday morning, as two pieces of an oil tanker in the western Atlantic drifted in opposite directions, the Earth passed through the trail of a comet, creating a spectacle of shooting stars. This particular moment in space-time happened to find me sitting in a field in Barrington, RI, gazing east. We looked and we saw. Some of the meteors were nothing extraordinary, while others streaked across much of the sky, leaving long trails that only fully faded after a few seconds. The Leonid meteor shower occurs every year when small particles of dust left by the sun-orbiting comet Tempel-Tuttle vaporize as they hit the Earth's atmosphere. The event is annual, but a Leonid shower with an intensity equal to that of this week's show is not scheduled to occur again until 2098. As the morning pinks and oranges gradually materialized in the east, overtaking the night sky and its stars, I thought about how the sunrise had totally shown up the celestial fireworks display. And to think, you can see this amazing event every day of your life. |
copyright © 2002, The College
Hill Independent
last updated 11 22 02
James deBoer, Soul Brother #1, gets on up, gets into it, and gets involved about