Author: maryiashaban

The Great Lakes attract people all year round with the promise of swimming, fishing in, and hiking along the beautiful shores of the lakes. A much darker undercurrent flows beneath all of this lovely scenery, an environmental catastrophe that has been brewing for nearly 200 years. Due to the effects of retreating glaciers and a failed continental rift, lakes Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior are more like  smaller inland seas, holding about 20 percent of Earth’s freshwater. These lakes were generally isolated from larger international waters until a network of canals and seaways let in freighters from around the world. This resulted in new nonnative species now making a home in these lakes; alewives, sea lampreys, and zebra mussels being particularly dangerous to the gentle equilibrium that previously existed in the lakes. The lakes have also been introduced to the new burden of toxic algal blooms and extreme fluctuations in the lakes’ water levels connected to climate change. Despite all the bad news scientists are experimenting in the laboratory with gene drives to stop invasive Asian carp and with new ways to rid ships of stowaways lurking in ballast water.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/invasive-species-climate-change-threaten-great-lakes?mode=topic&context=60

My project was for the Macaulay STEAM festival this year was based on the 26th Ward Sewer Shed located in the Jamaica Bay Area in Brooklyn, New York. The 26th Ward in Brooklyn serves  the communities of Starret City, Brownsville, East New York Cypress Hills, and Spring Creek, a community of a generally lower socioeconomic status that is often further economically depressed when storm surge from catastrophic events like superstorm Sandy damage property and create health hazards. A major issue challenging the 26th Ward is combined sewer overflow (CSO). CSO occurs when stormwater on roofs, streets, and sidewalks, in addition to wastewater from residential and commercial businesses, is carried through to treatment plants, causing an excess of water in the treatment system. This excess then spills into and pollutes the nearby Jamaica Bay.

Given the complexity of this issue, NYC can approach it from a two-fold stance through the implementation of grey and green infrastructure. In particular, the development of a  deeper storage tunnel-interception system would allow CSO to be contained through the construction of interceptor tunnels. These tunnels will release the excess water into the system once the system has the capacity to effectively process it. In addition, public green spaces (on rooftops and parks) can be made impervious so as to slow down the rate at which water flows into the system.

Due to their lower socioeconomic status, people in Jamaica Bay are often aided last after natural disasters – even though they face the brunt of the catastrophe. Some people that live here already do not have enough money to pay for everyday necessities, let alone all of the money they must now expend to pay for damaged property. A safer neighborhood due to well regulated runoff will attract contracters, real estate agents and more families to an area that has great potential to be a neighborhood and greenspace with a unique personality in the City of New York.

The Scandanavian city of Stockholm has developed a rather interesting means of incorporating green space into an urban environment. Areas in the city that have been restricted to the public in previous decades (royal gardens, military academies) have been transformed into agricultural and forestry areas which they call green wedges. They extend from the center of the city to the rural area outside Stockholm and support many functions. The green wedges act as the link between the city’s greenery and the surrounding countryside which is important for the potential for maintaining a functioning ecosystem and natural biological diversity in rural and urban areas alike. The forestry improves the air quality and storm runoff water from built-up areas can be infiltrated in these areas. The City of Stockholm is developing a ”Green map” to plan its land use. It consists of three parts: biotope map, recycling map and sociotope map. The biotopes map makes it possible to valuate biodiversity. The recycling map identifies areas for recycling of nutrients from composting, storm runoff water treatment, energy forestry and so on. The sociotope map introduces the concept sociotope in planning, and is a way of managing sociocultural aspects.

Humans have introduced a multitude of species into the once pristine, untouched Galapagos Islands. Some of these species have thrived over the past centuries and assimilated into the equilibrium of the environment, but a select few have thrown off the natural predator- prey balance of the island. Eradicating the invasive species on the island is very expensive, time consuming, and dangerous to the animals and even people which are it targeted.  Researchers are beginning to look to a more long term goal to fix the problem. If scientists genetically engineer the sex cells of the invasive species they could make it so that the species targeted are no longer viable, or only producing males thereby eradicating their population off the islands in the future without ever employing and toxic chemicals to the island injuring its inhabitants. This form of genetic engineering is called gene drive. The basic strategy of using gene drive in the conservation setting is to work with the DNA using either the new gene-editing tool CRISPR or other tools of genetic manipulation, to change the odds of sex inheritance; one example would be to produce offspring that would be exclusively male. The elimination of females, would establish a reproductive dead end for the invasive species species.

Scientists have noticed shorelines slipping away into the ever rising sea level. All the while, a change in the trend is being observed in Greenland. Despite being home to the worlds second largest ice sheet, the river deltas are growing here, while they are receding everywhere else. In findings published in the journal Nature, researchers observed that as glaciers melt the fresh water they produce picks up and deposits sediments along the shorelines.  Scientists were surprised that the ocean does not play a larger role in eroding the coast line; they found that Greenland’s deltas are shielded from the ocean’s waves by large, steep-cliffed fjords. Greenland’s glaciers have been experiencing increasing ice loss for three decades. The shifting coastline is a  reminder that Greenland’s ice sheet is changing in ways that may have consequences elsewhere in the world.

The human population constantly leave elements of their existence in the nature of the world around us. Our footprints are all around us and we constantly leave them. Geophysicists have put together a “global-scale” image of the secondary effects of the melting glaciers on the planet’s sea levels.

Sea levels have been rising and falling at rapid rates, but not evenly around the globe. Scientists have started to piece together the puzzle of this phenomenon. Ice sheets on planet Earth, being denser than water, exert a gravitational pull on all water bodies in their proximity. Similarly to the way that the moon exerts a noticeable gravitational pull on the water creating tides, except at a much less dramatic level,glaciers pull on the water around them creating an elevated sea level at their edges. As the glaciers melt in consequence of the further opening of the ozone hole (our footprint), they become less massive therefore exerting a smaller gravitational pull on the rest of the water and lowering the sea level. Simultaneously, the land rises up because the ice does not weigh it down so much. This creates an even further drop in sea level.

The loss of mass changes Earth’s gravitational field causing the water from the glaciers and ocean water to move away towards faraway coastlines; the resulting pattern of sea-level rise is the fingerprint of melting from that particular ice sheet or glacier. In some parts of the world therefore the sea level will rise and in others it is prone to decreasing. Most of the burden of rising sea levels is taken on by the middle and lower latitudes.

To read more about this phenomenon visit scientificamerican.com under the Earth and Sustainability tab.