Word: chukchi
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...drilling may not happen for years and is likely to face lengthy legal challenges from environmentalists - as is already the case in Alaska. (Drilling might happen faster off the coast of Virginia, where Republican Governor Bob McDonnell supports oil and gas exploration.) Leases in the vast Beaufort and Chukchi seas, north of Alaska, which had been up for sale under the Bush Administration, will be withdrawn for now while the Interior Department takes another look at the environmental risks of drilling in the delicate Arctic. "We're relieved that the Administration is going to depend on science in making decisions...
...group of hunters aboard a small boat out of the tiny Alaska village of Wainwright were the first to spot what would eventually be called "the blob." It was a dark, floating mass stretching for miles through the Chukchi Sea, a frigid and relatively shallow expanse of Arctic Ocean water between Alaska's northwest coast and the Russian Far East. The goo was fibrous, hairy. When it touched floating ice, it looked almost black...
...Alaska, nothing suggests that the Chukchi Sea blob is toxic, though the Coast Guard's Hasenauer says toxicity tests are planned. In any case, virtually no commercial seafood production comes from the waters along Alaska's northern coast, but residents do fish, hunt whales and harvest other animals as part of a traditional subsistence lifestyle. In the meantime, the blob for the most part is staying away from the shoreline and slowly drifting farther away...
...effect that crude oil can have on a vulnerable marine environment: it is more toxic to life than we thought, and harder to clean up. "Even the best cleanup will fall short," says Craig Tillery, a deputy attorney general for the state of Alaska - whose Bristol Bay and Chukchi Sea are being considered for offshore oil and gas exploration - and a member of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, which funded the NOAA studies. "You have to make sure this never happens...
Those oil- and gas-drilling leases include the $2 billion February sale of rights to 30 million acres of the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's northwest coast, home to about a fifth of the world's remaining polar bears. Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity and the author of the initial petition to list the polar bear takes the opposite view; she figures the FWS decision was delayed to allow the sale to go through in the first place. Not surprising coming from an Administration Siegel calls rabidly "anti-wildlife." The scarcity of animals that have been listed...