Word: coastal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This summer's pollution of Northeastern beaches and coastal waters is only the latest signal that the planet's life belt, as Cousteau calls the ocean, is rapidly unbuckling. True, there are some farsighted projects here and there to repair the damage, and there was ample evidence in Atlanta last week that the Democrats hope to raise the nation's consciousness about environmental problems. The heightened interest comes not a moment too soon, since marine biologists and environmentalists are convinced that oceanic pollution is reaching epidemic proportions...
...problem for the U.S. stems from rampant development along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the Gulf of Mexico. Between 1940 and 1980, the number of Americans who live within 50 miles of a seashore increased from 42 million to 89 million -- and the total is still mounting. Coastal waters are getting perilously close to reaching their capacity to absorb civilization's wastes...
Suffocating and sometimes poisonous blooms of algae -- the so-called red and brown tides -- regularly blot the nation's coastal bays and gulfs, leaving behind a trail of dying fish and contaminated mollusks and crustaceans. Patches of water that have been almost totally depleted of oxygen, known as dead zones, are proliferating. As many as 1 million fluke and flounder were killed earlier this summer when they became trapped in anoxic water in New Jersey's Raritan Bay. Another huge dead zone, 300 miles long and ten miles wide, is adrift in the Gulf of Mexico...
...Pacific coastal waters are generally cleaner than most, but they also contain pockets of dead -- and deadly -- water. Seattle's Elliott Bay is contaminated with a mix of copper, lead, arsenic, zinc, cadmium and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chemicals once widely used by the ( electrical-equipment industry. "The bottom of this bay is a chart of industrial history," says Thomas Hubbard, a water-quality planner for Seattle. "If you took a core sample, you could date the Depression, World War II. You could see when PCBs were first used and when they were banned and when lead was eliminated from gasoline...
...Francisco Bay is also contaminated with copper, nickel, cadmium, mercury and other heavy metals from industrial discharges. Last year toxic discharges increased 23%. In Los Angeles urban runoff and sewage deposits have had a devastating impact on coastal ecosystems, notably in Santa Monica Bay, which gets occasional floods of partly processed wastes from a nearby sewage- treatment plant during heavy rainstorms. Off San Diego's Point Loma, a popular haunt of skin divers, the waters are so contaminated with sewage that undersea explorers run the risk of bacterial infection...