Ocean Pollution

It can be hard to find what you're looking for in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But scientists on an August research cruise had no problem tracking down their subject. "We did observe a lot of plastic out there in the ocean about 1,000 miles from anything," said Miriam Goldstein, chief scientist on the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition. "It's pretty shocking." A group of doctoral students and research volunteers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and Project Kaisei spent nearly three weeks on the research vessel New Horizon taking samples and exploring the plastic garbage patch floating in the North Pacific.

Just off downtown Long Beach, where freighters queue up to unload much of the nation's imported goods, a long wall of rock rises from the waves, encrusted with mussels and crawling with crabs. This is the Long Beach breakwater, a 2.2-mile vestige of World War II designed to shield the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet from stormy seas and enemy torpedoes.

Facing forecasts of wet weather that could flush tons of urban trash out to sea and onto local beaches, Los Angeles County authorities scrambled Thursday to reinstall a boom across the outlet of the Los Angeles River to keep debris out of Long Beach Harbor. The boom had been decommissioned Monday because the county Department of Public Works ran out of money to keep it operating.

In a sobering self-assessment of the response to last year's San Francisco Bay oil spill, a U.S. Coast Guard study released Monday conceded that the first crews on the scene dramatically underestimated the trouble and onshore commanders failed to properly alert the public and local officials. But the 130-page report on the aftermath of the Nov.

Edward D. Goldberg, a marine chemist at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography who studied the effects of ocean pollution, died March 7 at his Encinitas home in northern San Diego County after a long illness, the institute announced. He was 86. A member of the Scripps faculty since 1949, Goldberg helped develop the federally funded Mussel Watch program in the 1970s to measure the levels of contaminants in mussels and other shellfish that concentrate pollutants in their tissue.

West Coast governors urged the federal government Tuesday to keep new oil drilling rigs out of their waters and to spend more money on programs to restore the health of the Pacific Ocean. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, joined with Democratic Govs. Ted Kulongoski of Oregon and Chris Gregoire of Washington to reaffirm their opposition to opening undersea oil fields to new drilling, as part of an elaborate action plan for preserving coastal waters.

Many fish caught off Los Angeles County still contain extremely high levels of DDT, a sign that anglers and consumers remain at risk and that the ocean's ecosystem may be far from recovery 35 years after the pesticide was banned. Newly released data from a federal survey indicate that fish caught in the area contained the world's highest-known DDT concentrations.

A Los Angeles Times series describing the profound degradation of the world's oceans won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting Monday, the 38th time the newspaper has been awarded journalism's top honor. The five-part "Altered Oceans" project, headed by environmental reporter Kenneth R.

Although record low rainfall made most of California's coastal waters safer to bathe in over the past year by reducing contaminated storm and creek runoff into the ocean, it wasn't enough to improve potentially risky bacteria levels at some of Los Angeles County's best known beaches, according to an annual environmental report released Wednesday.

For years, surfers at popular Rincon Point north of Ventura complained that foul ocean water was making them sick. They cited studies showing that human waste from leaky septic tanks from dozens of beach homes was responsible for the pollution. On Tuesday, Ventura County supervisors unanimously supported a resolution that could pave the way for 72 Rincon Point homeowners to decide if they want to assess themselves for the cost of replacing septic tanks with sewer service.