Watching Our Water Ways

Capt. Jim Maya of Maya’s Westside Charters on San Juan Island sent me his favorite photos of 2011.

“Though perhaps not technically my best,” he wrote. “they are my personal favorites. I hope you enjoy them and have a great 2012.”

Jim sent the photos on Jan. 1, so the delay in getting them online is all mine. The captions below each picture are Jim’s comments about the events and circumstances of the moment. Click on each photo for a better view.

Nov. 19. Ts with Sucia Island and Mt. Baker. We first found them at Speiden Island thanks to Kim and Karl Bruder, who run Lonesome Cove. Evening light. / Capt. Jim Maya

Aug. 26. Spectacular speed swimming! We call it porpoising for some reason. Strait of Georgia headed toward the Frazer River. Wish the lighting had been better, but you get the idea. / Capt. Jim Maya

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS
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Just before Christmas, my wife Sue bought a wall clock with a face that appears to be a water-color print of a nice cottage in a meadow. There’s a stream in the foreground and trees in the background. Sue said she wanted to have a clock in the bathroom to keep her on time as she gets dressed and ready to leave the house.

Audubon singing bird clock / Click on image to visit DutchGuard.com and hear the birds

The day after she put up the clock, as I was getting out of the shower, the bathroom suddenly became immersed in the sound of singing birds. Sue had purchased a clock that somehow forced a large number of birds to sing on cue at the top of every hour.

I’ve gotten used to the clock, but I was wondering if people really enjoy time pieces that make animal noises. Judging by what I found on the Internet, I guess they do. The Audubon clock, at right, features the sounds of real birds, unlike the mixture of birds calls that come from out bathroom.

The folks at DutchGuard.com are serious about their bird clocks:

“Don’t be fooled by imitations. Our original bird clocks sing longer and sound like real birds… Most people buy our bird clocks because of the wonderful songs, but we would be remiss if we did not mention the attention to detail which went into the pictures. In consultation with experts every effort was made to accurately depict in true colors each of the twelve birds. Our insistence on getting the images and sounds ‘just right’ took the better part of a year.”

Other clocks are more amusing. I’ve posted some some of the ones I have found. Click on the little MP3 player to hear the sound, or click on the image for the website where you can order any of these clocks. You may find other websites featuring the same clocks but without the sound samples.

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Because of the holidays, I did not get an immediate response from several climate experts I contacted following Nels Sultan’s comments about sea level rise in a blog post regarding “king tides.”

Earth at the winter solstice, Dec. 22, 2011 / NOAA photo

If you recall, Nels was making the point that the sea level in Seattle has been rising at a steady rate of .68 feet, or about 8 inches, per century since 1898, as reported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

His post included this statement:

“There is no real basis for the claims that sea levels will rise by 2.6 feet or 7 feet, or more. Globally, sea level rise has NOT accelerated. As found and reported by many researchers who specialize in this, including the eminent professor Bob Dean and other coastal experts.”

As a reporter, I’m not inclined to shoot back a response. I’d rather discuss the issue with experts in the field. That is what I did, and I think I have a better handle on the issue.

What I’m hearing is that the original estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a rise of between 7 inches and 2 feet by the end of the century — remain reasonable, but conservative given that they did not account for increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet. See this explanation by Stefan Rahmstorf soon after the release of the 2007 IPCC report. By the way, the range above accounts for the minimum and maximum across six climate-change scenarios.

Ever since, researchers have been trying to find ways to account for the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, but the uncertainties remain high. A widely cited paper by W.T. Pfeffer, J.T. Harper and S. O’Neel suggests that “most likely” starting point for further refinement is .8 meter, or 31 inches, of sea level rise by 2100.

In some ways, the authors of the Pfeffer paper were trying to limit some of the extremes being reported by others, so they concluded that sea level rise could not be more than 6 feet by 2100. Some folks have reported 6 feet as the top of the range, as unlikely as that extreme may be. Check out this explanation posed by Real Climate and this response by Pfeffer and his collaborators.

As for the Houston-Dean paper that Nels Sultan mentioned, those authors created “various problems” in their assumptions, according to Eric Steig, professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. One major problem was the starting date of 1930, as explained by Stefan Rahmstorf in Real Climate:

“Other start dates either before or after this minimum show positive acceleration. Picking 1930 for this analysis is thus a classic cherry-pick, and according to the authors that is no accident. They write in the paper: ‘Since the worldwide data of Church and White (2006)…appear to have a linear rise since around 1930, we analyzed the period 1930 to 2010.’ The interval was thus hand-picked to show a linear rise rather than acceleration.

“Houston & Dean use their result to question the future acceleration of sea level rise predicted by Vermeer & Rahmstorf (2009) for the 21st Century as a consequence of global warming. They argue that the 1930s acceleration minimum calls into question the semi-empirical link between global temperature and global sea level proposed by us in that paper. However, it is clear they never bothered to check this, because quite the opposite is the case: our semi-empirical formula predicts this acceleration minimum, as the graph above shows. As it turns out, this is an expected outcome of the mid-20th-Century plateau in global temperature.”

I also discussed this issue of sea level rise with Lara Whitely Binder, outreach specialist for the UW’s Climate Impacts Group. While sea level rise means one thing on the world scale, she told me, the local impacts can be quite different.

If you live in Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula, for example, you are not likely to see any sea level rise until at least 2080. That’s because the entire land mass is uplifting as a result of movement along the tectonic plates, and the uplift is predicted to be faster than sea level rise until late in the century.

On the other hand, Central and South Puget Sound may not be uplifting at all and could be sinking, which would intensify the effects of sea level rise. Areas built on fill, including portions of Olympia, also could be sinking as the fill settles, Lara said.

In addition to global rise in sea level and local tectonic shifts, factors affecting regional sea level rise include thermal expansion of ocean waters and changes in onshore and offshore wind patterns.

During El Niño events, sea level can rise as much as 12 inches for several months at a time. The Climate Impacts Group analyzed more than 30 scenarios from global climate models and concluded that the change in wind patterns as a result of climate change could decrease sea level by as much as 1 inch or possibly increase it by as much as 6 inches. Review the white paper “Sea Level Rise in the Coastal Waters of Washington State” (PDF 2.4 mb) for more details.

How much an individual property is affected by sea level rise depends on the slope of the beach. Given the same rate of rise, water will affect a house sooner when it is built on a gradually sloping beach as opposed to a steep slope. In any case, tides and weather will always play a major role in water levels.

Lara told me that a group of West Coast researchers is working on a new report about sea level for publication later this year by the National Academy of Sciences. I’ll try to review that paper when it comes out.

I wish to thank Eric Steig, Lara Whitely Binder, Cliff Mass, David Montgomery and Nate Mantua for responding to my inquiry.

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“National Wildlife,” the magazine of the National Wildlife Federation, consistently presents some of the best nature photography around. I count on the magazine’s annual photography contest for some amusing and touching pictures with a water theme.

The picture of the waterfall, at right, shows a human figure doing a cartwheel in front of a waterfall at the end of a rainbow. The photo won first place in the amateur category “Connecting People and Nature.”

I was amused by the human jubilation juxtaposed against hard and soft landscape elements.

The photographer, Justin Black of McKinney, Texas, found the rainbow at the Skógafoss Waterfall in Iceland during a visit with his college classmates from Switzerland. When one person was inspired to do a cartwheel, Black grabbed the shot, adding the important human element to the scene.

Another amusing photo shows a frog in the middle of a jump, below. It was taken by Rolf Nussbaumer of New Braunfels, Texas, and won first place in the category “Other Wildlife, Professional.”

Nussbaumer explained that the photo was taken after a dry period in Texas, when rainfall triggered a burst of yellow wildflowers and an abundance of toads and frogs. One cane frog in a field near Loredo was jumping unusually high, and Nussbaumer was able to freeze the motion. The photo editors noted that the cane toad is an invasive species in some parts of the country, but not in southern Texas, where it is native.

For more amazing images from 2011, go to the contest page, where 17 pictures are laid out on a page with notes from the photographers. Better yet, view more than 30 photographs from winners at all levels in a slideshow on the website.

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The Washington King Tide Initiative is entering its third year, and state officials would like people to shoot photographs of flooded roads, yards and buildings — if such events occur.

In 2010, the high tide at the mouth of Gorst Creek comes close to reaching Toys Topless at the head of Sinclair Inlet in Gorst.
Photo by Meegan M. Reid, Kitsap Sun

High tides are expected to continue for the next few days and return to high levels again in mid-January. Whether flooding occurs at any one place depends on rainfall, winds and atmospheric pressure, as well as tidal levels dictated by the position of the moon and sun. (See NOAA Ocean Service Education.)

Not much flooding occurred during king tides last year, but plenty of photographs were collected in early 2010. That’s when the picture on this page was taken in Gorst between Bremerton and Port Orchard. For additional photos, check out the Flickr page or the video slide show put together by the Washington Department of Ecology.

Taking note of these high tides is one way to gauge how climate change may affect shoreline areas. Over the next 100 years, sea level is expected to rise by at least 2.6 feet, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, although previous estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were in the range of 7 inches to 2 feet.

The King Tide Initiative started in Australia in 2009, according to Ecology’s website on King Tides, but it soon became a project for the West Coast of North America, with Washington and British Columbia joining in 2010 and Oregon and California joining in 2011.

Visit Flickr pages for British Columbia, Oregon and California, which includes regional pages for San Francisco Bay, Santa Monica and San Diego.

For a list of high tides, go to Ecology’s King Tide Schedule page and click on the map. More precise information can be found on NOAA’s page of tide predictions, where you can zoom in to your area of interest.

For past King Tide events, check out my Water Ways entries for Jan. 21, 2011 and Feb. 1, 2010.

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Knowing more than a few sewer operators in my day, I can tell you that their leading pet peeve is all the stuff that people dump down their toilets and drains.

I’ll never forget the courtroom description of a giant “rag ball” — some 30 feet long — found in Bremerton’s sewer. Rag balls are the accumulation of diapers, tampons and baby wipes that get flushed down the toilet and become caught somewhere in the sewer lines.

Bremerton’s famous rag ball became wrapped up in courtroom testimony during a lawsuit against a sewer contractor hired by the city to run the operation. For details, check out my story from April of 1998.

Steve Anderson

What I really wanted to share with you this week is a song called “O Christmas Grease” by Steve Anderson, a water resources analyst at Clean Water Services. This is the agency that manages wastewater and stormwater in a 12-city region west of Portland, Ore.

Steve often writes music and performs in a band when he’s not working at the utility. He told me that he started writing original songs as well as parodies of existing tunes to entertain his fellow water experts at conferences. Last week, for example, he showed up at a conference to help educators decide whether humor is useful in educating people about wastewater issues.

Steve says the public-education folks at Clean Water Services tolerates his songs, but they do not fully embrace his activities. His first song — a parody about the low levels of drugs that make it through the treatment process — got him into a little hot water with some folks in the business. “Dope in the Water” is sung to the tune of the Deep Purple original.

“The Ballad of Betty Poop” was written as a kid’s song for Take-Your-Children-to-Work Day. It’s about the adventures of a plastic GI Joe and other characters. It includes these famous lines: “Give it up, you toilet treasures… You’ll never make it all the way to the river…”

Steve has not released these songs to the public, though he readily shares them with friends and anyone who will listen. I must thank Gayle Leonard, who writes a blog called “Thirsty in Suburbia,” for bringing Steve’s songs out into the light and putting me in touch with this creative force in the sewer world.

Download the lyrics to all five songs (PDF 72 kb)

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“Mythbusters,” the television show that takes on urban legends and other strange science-based questions, put together a compilation of more than a dozen featured experiments in a program titled “Wet and Wild.”

This show could have been made with “Amusing Monday” in mind. Unfortunately, the Discovery Channel chose not to offer the entire program to online viewers.

The good news is that I was able to find some of the segments separately and will provide them for you here, beginning with the wild waterslide ride, which is in the video player on this page.

Other segments:

Swimming in syrup

Water torture

Running on water (This was not in the “Wet and Wild” program, but it should have been.)

If you haven’t heard, one of the Mythbusters cannon balls got away last week, skipping away from a bomb range in California and damaging a house near the site of the experiment. Check out the Associated Press video or read the AP story.

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The headline on BBC Nature News calls an underwater ice formation the “Brinicle Ice Finger of Death.”

“Brinicle” is short for “briny icicle,” while “Ice Finger of Death” is a dramatic title for a fascinating natural phenomenon found in Antarctica and captured in stunning time-lapse photography for the BBC One series “Frozen Planet.” Click here for the video.

The video shows a finger of heavy water reaching down from the surface and then advancing across the sea floor, encasing starfish and sea urchins in unexpected ice.

The water coming off Little Razorback Island near Ross Archipelago contained a high salt content, the result of separation as ice freezes at the surface. Because of its high concentration of salt, the runoff water was denser and colder than the surrounding ocean (well below the freezing point of fresh water). As the brine drained off the island, it caused the seawater to freeze around it as the brinicle advanced.

The phenomenon had been noted before, but finding a place where a brinicle was forming and setting up the film equipment was a feat in itself, as photographer Hugh Miller explained to reporter Ella Davies of BBC Nature:

“That particular patch was difficult to get to. It was a long way from the hole and it was quite narrow at times between the sea bed and the ice. I do remember it being a struggle… The kit is very heavy because it has to sit on the sea bed and not move for long periods of time.”

Frisky seals in the area barged into the scene, breaking off pieces of the brinicle and messing with the film gear, but eventually the crew got the dramatic video they were seeking.

The series “Frozen Planet” apparently is not yet available in the United States. The clip shown in the video player above can be viewed on the BBC Nature page if the YouTube version does not work.

Since the clip above was posted on YouTube last Wednesday, it has gone viral, with more than 4.9 million viewings. (The clip, which was copied from the BBC website, has since been taken down.)

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Five years of studies and analysis have helped refine our understanding about the toxic pollution getting into the streams of Puget Sound and eventually into the open marine waters.

The latest study on toxic chemicals (PDF 3.1 mb) Click on image to download

The final report in the series was released yesterday, prompting a story I wrote for today’s Kitsap Sun.

When accounting for all the pollution, it’s not surprising to learn that the sources of toxic chemicals are so diverse that it is difficult to figure out where everything is coming from. But we do know that if chemicals are picked up in stormwater, they are likely to make their way into freshwater, where they pose short-term or long-term risks to aquatic organisms.

The solutions are common sense, if one can be assured of the sources of harmful chemicals:

1. Remove materials from the environment if they are found to release toxic pollution. This can involve a legal ban on certain products or else educating people to select less toxic alternatives.
2. Reduce the amount of stormwater that flows into streams by infiltrating rainwater into the ground before it leaves the site. This “low-impact development” can include permeable pavement, rain gardens and even natural forests where a thick organic carpet has been retained.
3. Clean sediment out of storm drains and sweep up the dust on city streets and other areas where toxic chemicals are likely to reside in metallic form or be bound to soil particles. Safely dispose of these materials. When the rains arrive, there won’t be much left to wash into streams.

While all this sounds simple enough, the issue gets complicated when trying to decide which products to ban and when to recommend that people voluntarily stop using certain items. Alternative products may cost more, which tends to raise questions among users. Also, manufacturers and retailers are not likely to give up selling profitable products without a fight.

Further complicating the situation is the scientific uncertainty surrounding the alleged harm when someone declares a product not good for the environment. Such uncertainty inevitably sparks scientific, economic and policy debate about whether the proposed action is justified.

For example, the Washington Legislature approved a ban on automobile brake pads containing certain levels of copper. Brake pads are believed to release enough copper to harm salmon in some urban streams. But the metallic form of copper found in brake pads is not toxic until it is converted to an ionic form. How much gets converted in the environment is still a question. For details, see a story I wrote for the Kitsap Sun in March of 2010.

As for the latest study released yesterday, some additional focused research and debate may be needed before further actions can be taken.

For example, questions are raised about the total amount of toxic metals leached from roofing materials, including common asphalt shingles. Copper, cadmium, lead and zinc are listed as contaminants along with diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP).

As suggested by the report, direct studies of roofs in the Puget Sound region could help determine the potential harm of various roofing materials and suggest whether bans or advisories are appropriate.

The amount of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) coming from creosote-treated wood was something of a surprise in the report. If anything, the findings tend to support the ongoing effort by the Department of Natural Resources, which has been removing creosote pilings from shorelines. Further studies might help to focus removal efforts in areas most sensitive to creosote compounds.

The latest report, which includes discussions about the uncertainties, is called “Assessment of Selected Toxic Chemicals in the Puget Sound Basin, 2007-2011.” You may also wish to review all the toxics work to date on Ecology’s webpage called “Control of Toxic Chemicals in Puget Sound.”

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I’ve been away from “Water Ways” quite a lot lately while covering a trial in Tacoma involving safety and environmental concerns at Kitsap Rifle and Revolver Club. Kitsap County is suing the club over operations at its gun range near Bremerton. (Watch for my “live blogging” or read the stories on the Kitsap Sun website.)

Meanwhile, I’d like to call your attention to a story by Kitsap Sun reporter Brynn Grimley, who took a “salmon tour” via kayak last weekend. Her close-up story and some great photos by Meeghan Reid can be seen in Sunday’s Kitsap Sun.

Whale Trail poster / Click on image to download poster (PDF 1.5 mb)

As chum salmon begin to arrive in small streams throughout the Kitsap Peninsula, you may wish to carefully observe their migration and spawning. Several years ago, a couple of us at the Sun created a map with videos depicting the best viewing spots. Check out Kitsap Sun Salmon Map. I hope to update the videos with new information when I get time.

Another map that may be of interest is the “Whale Trails” map that purports to show the best places in Puget Sound to view marine mammals. Unfortunately, there are no places shown on the Kitsap Peninsula. I might recommend Point No Point County Park in North Kitsap, locations on the Kingston waterfront, and Bachmann Park in the city of Bremerton, as well as several places on Bainbridge Island.

The Whale Trail organization sent me a poster for the Washington State Ferries that will help riders know what kinds of marine mammals they may be seeing. This is a great idea, and I hope people will take the opportunity to learn about the kinds of animals common in the waters of Puget Sound. Click on the image (PDF 2.5 mb), above right, to download the poster.

The Puget Sound killer whales are a little late this year in making excursions into South Puget Sound. They typically come south hunting for chum salmon after the runs of chinook decline up north. I’ll have more to say about this when we begin to see them more frequently, assuming they are just late this year.

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