Latest Coast Stories

By Shelley Terry, Star Beacon, Ashtabula, Ohio Jun. 14--ASHTABULA -- Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad W. Allen will travel Monday with Rep. Steven C. LaTourette, R-Concord, to Coast Guard Stations Fairport and Ashtabula. Allen, LaTourette and a representative from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington will meet with recreational boaters at the Fairport Harbor Senior Center and then on to Ashtabula to take a boat tour of the Ashtabula Harbor. Allen will discuss boating...

A U.N. University report said on Wednesday that high food prices could be adding pressure for more fishing along coasts where the environment faces threats from pollution and climate change.The report said governments needed to work out better policies to safeguard resources. An estimated 40 percent of all people live within 30 miles of coasts.The study by the university's International Network on Water, Environment and Health (INWEH) said that the decline is terminal and that much more...

Along the U.S.-Mexico border, the fragile salt marshes at the mouth of the Tijuana River are clinging to life as one of the last vestiges of undeveloped California coast, where tall grasses sway gently in the breeze and rare birds stop to nest.Just across the border is another landscape: old tires, plastic bottles, raw sewage and vast amounts of filthy sediment, all of it threatening to wash across the divide and spoil one of California's few surviving coastal wetlands.Conservationists are...

An Atlantic storm that kicked up huge waves reaching as high 30 feet has caused the beaches of Barbados to become littered with pieces of broken coral.  Some of the white coral had washed up in chunks as heavy as seven pounds, with their polyps rubbed away by the rough surf.Scientists reported Sunday that the amount of coral rubble on the island's coast may indicate damage to the region's coral reefs. Leo Brewster, director of Barbados' Coastal Zone Management Unit, is organizing dives...

More than 40 percent of the world's oceans are heavily impacted by human activities, such as overfishing and pollution, leaving only four percent relatively unspoiled, according to a new study that provides a first of its kind map that shows the damaging effects of human activities across the world's oceans.According to the new map, the most heavily affected waters include the East Coast of North America, North Sea, South and East China Seas, Caribbean Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, Persian...

The changing climate is threatening the coast of Britain. Seven of the ten warmest years ever recorded for Britain's waters have been in the last decade, the governments "Marine Climate Change Impacts" report shows. This climate change is wreaking havoc on the marine wildlife off the coast of Britain, destroying the coastline, heating the water, and increasing the chances of flooding and major storms, the government reports. The warmth of the water is killing both micro-organisms and...

By Ben Hirschler LYME REGIS (Reuters) - The quaint seaside town of Lyme Regis with its narrow, winding streets seems a million miles from the melting polar ice caps or the flooded coral atolls of the Pacific. But the exposed steel piling behind the promenade and the newly reinforced beach, designed to stop Lyme from crumbling into the sea, show that this, too, is a corner of the planet threatened by climate change. Many scientists reckon the world is warming due to the "greenhouse...