Soap, sunscreen and steroids found in Antarctic waters and wildlife

Range of pharmaceuticals found in fish, clams and sea urchins in waters around two research stations, says New Zealand researchers

Australian Associated Press

theguardian.com, Tuesday 2 December 2014 23.06 GMT

The last great wilderness on Earth now has traces of personal care products and steroid hormones.

New Zealand scientists have said the waters around two Antarctic research stations have evidence of the active ingredients found in soaps, fragrances, sunscreens and lotions.

Researchers from the University of Canterbury and Northcott Research Consultants studied the levels of pharmaceuticals and personal care products, or PPCPs, around New Zealand’s Scott Base and the US facility McMurdo Station.

They found the active ingredients were present up to 25km from where sewage was discharged into the sea from treatment plants.

And they found traces of PPCPs in clams, fish and sea urchins collected from around the bases.

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Portugal protects over two million km2 of ocean from trawling

Most deep-sea fishing has now been prohibited by the Portuguese government in an area spanning more than two million km2, in a move to help promote sustainable fisheries and the conservation of deep-sea ecosystems. The exceptions are fishing with lines and hooks, and pole and line, and catching bait with a purse seine. Bottom longline fishing is confined to a fixed number of days a year and restricted to a minimal hook size and maximum number of hooks per line.

“Portugal has made a significant step to ensure that its fleet is exploiting deep-sea ecosystems sustainably," says Xavier Pastor, executive director of Oceana in Europe. "We hope that this measure, which will affect an area four times the size of the Iberian Peninsula, inspires other countries with fishing interests in the area to adopt similar bans.

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Earth's Greatest Extinction Hardly Changed Ocean Ways of Life

By Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience Contributor | February 23, 2014 01:00pm ET

Earth's largest mass extinction had surprisingly little effect on the range of lifestyles seen on the planet's seafloor, despite the loss of more than 90 percent of marine species, researchers find.

Understanding the impacts of this ancient extinction event may shed light on the damage climate change might now inflict on the planet, the scientists say.

The end-Permian mass extinction, which occurred 252 million years ago, was the biggest die-off in the planet's history, and the largest of the five mass extinctions seen in the fossil record. The cataclysm killed as much as 95 percent of all species on Earth.

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Huge 'Ocean' Discovered Inside Earth

Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.


The discovery marks the first time such a large body of water has found in the planet's deep mantle. 


The finding, made by Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence, now at the University of California, San Diego, will be detailed in a forthcoming monograph to be published by the American Geophysical Union.


Looking down deep

The pair analyzed more than 600,000 seismograms — records of waves generated by earthquakes traveling through the Earth—collected from instruments scattered around the planet. 

They noticed a region beneath Asia where seismic waves appeared to dampen, or "attenuate," and also slow down slightly. "Water slows the speed of waves a little," Wysession explained. "Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well."

Read on:  http://www.livescience.com/1312-huge-ocean-discovered-earth.html