Putting up parking lots, hotels, condos
Editor's note: This story is part of a project spearheaded by GlobalPost's Study Abroad team and summer interns. They spent the summer learning about the world's endangered oceans and their work is displayed in this interactive graphic.
DUBAI, U.A.E. — In the impeccably azure waters off the coast of Dubai swam a staggering diversity of colorful marine life, flashing silver, bright yellow and indigo blue for divers lucky enough to be there.
Michele Taylor, a New Zealander and an avid diver living in Dubai, dove regularly off the coast to add credits to her diving certificate. Suddenly, the waters turned cloudy and murky, rendering the visibility very low.
“The water was horrible,” she recalls. “At times it was like swimming in a soup, and the visibility was shocking.”
Make way for luxury residential and commercial construction, built atop man-made islands along the coast of the Persian Gulf. Island after man-made island has risen out of the ocean, each bigger and more extravagant than the last. The Palms, The World, and The Waterfront are some major projects. Simultaneously, this massive metamorphosis of the ocean’s landscape has bludgeoned the marine environment.
By 2050, 91 percent of the world’s coastlines will have been affected by development, says a 2008 paper authored by eight scientists, “Stemming Decline of the Coastal Ocean: Rethinking Environmental Management," published by the United Nations University seated in Canada. The impacts of coastal development are immense.
The Persian Gulf is a vulnerable environment for marine plants and animals. The water is shallow and the temperatures soar to extreme levels during the summer heat. Water moves very slowly in and out of the area.
“It takes three years for a droplet of water to make a full counter-clockwise turn in the Persian Gulf,” says Nader Ardalan, a research fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University since 2006. “Years can pass before any pollution is expunged.”
Ardalan listed a long history of environmental damage on the Persian Gulf.
"Three wars in the Gulf: Iraq-Iran, 1981; Kuwait War; and the Iraq War in 2003, has impacted the water quality and marine life," says Ardalan, "That's why it's a very delicate area."
But more recently, construction has become another factor in endangering the habitat.
To build an island, huge off-shore vessels dredge sand through tubes that vacuum the sea beds. Usually, sand is taken from shipping channels and pumped ashore, explains Bill Taylor of Carol R Johnson Associates, a landscape architecture company headquartered in Boston and involved in projects such as the Shams Central Park on Al Reem Island in Abu Dhabi.
Vacuuming the ocean floor, Taylor says, is vastly damaging. When sand is vacuumed from ocean’s floor, sediments loosen and spread into surrounding areas. Habitats are destroyed.
"Dredging kills animals sucked up into the dredge," explains Hunter Lenihan from the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California-Santa Barbara. It can also loosen sediments containing high quantities of pollutants that migrate with water currents.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/study-abroad/091117/coral-reef-destruction
