LSM3251 Ecology and Environmental Processes

Cyclone Sidr - a category 5 storm (Saffir-Simpson Scale)

2007-11-18T15:45:56Z

"Storms batter the country of Bangladesh each year causing hundreds of deaths. Perhaps the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded, the Bhola Cyclone, hit the Ganges Delta in November 1970 leaving up to half a million people dead. Another powerful storm killed over 100,000 people in 1991."
"According to the Joint Typhoon Warning Centre (JTWC), Sidr intensified to a category 5 storm on Thursday morning. Winds were reported to be 155mph (250km/h) with gusts 190mph (305km/h). This is the strongest classification of storm according to the Saffir-Simpson Scale."
"Bangladesh's director general of disaster management, Masood Siddiqui, told the BBC that the death toll had reached 2,000 people. "We are expecting that thousands of dead bodies may be found within a few days," Shekhar Chandra Das, deputy head of the government's disaster management office, told AFP. "We have not been able to collect information about casualties in many remote and impassable places due to the disruption to communications," he said."

Sources: BBC Weather, 15 Nov 2007; "Bangladesh toll more than 2,000," BBC News, 18 Nov 2007.

Tree fall in NUS

2007-11-14T04:11:35Z

When a tree falls, it takes with it the epiphytic community with it. After the morning's heavy rain...

"Heartening recovery of Chek Jawa"

2007-11-03T05:53:35Z

Read about your classmate Loh Kok Sheng's recent field work observations at Chek Jawa and the return of the knobbly sea star! [link]

The poisoning of Lake Tai

2007-11-01T01:25:21Z

"In China, a Lake’s Champion Imperils Himself," by Joseph Kahn. New York Times, 14 Oct 2007. [link]

Read about Wu Lihong, a 40-year-old former factory salesman who "pioneered a style of intrepid, media-savvy environmental work that made Lake Tai, and the hundreds of chemical factories on its shores, the focus of intense regulatory scrutiny."

Read about how he attempted to document the pollution source by taking photos, collecting letters, petitions, water samples, submitted reports but finally got arrested!

What is not new is the disregard for the ecology of an ecosystem, leading to its pollution. The marine environment faces a similar problem but on a different scale, as it is a much larger body of water.

"The country’s third largest freshwater body, Lake Tai, or Taihu in Chinese, has long provided the people of the lower Yangtze River Delta with both their wealth and their conception of natural beauty.
It nurtured a bounty of the “three whites,” white shrimp, whitebait and whitefish, and a freshwater crustacean delicacy called the hairy crab. Natural and man-made streams irrigated rice paddies, and a network of canals ferried that produce far and wide.
Since the 1950s, however, Lake Tai has been under assault. The authorities constructed dams and weirs to improve irrigation and control floods, disrupting the cleansing circulation of fresh water. Phosphates and other pollution-borne nutrients made the lake eutrophic, sucking out oxygen that fish need to survive."
"Toxic cyanobacteria, commonly referred to as pond scum, turned the big lake fluorescent green. The stench of decay choked anyone who came within a mile of its shores. At least two million people who live amid the canals, rice paddies and chemical plants around the lake had to stop drinking or cooking with their main source of water.
The outbreak confirmed the claims of a crusading peasant, Wu Lihong, who protested for more than a decade that the region’s thriving chemical industry, and its powerful friends in the local government, were destroying one of China’s ecological treasures."

Thanks to Alvin Wong (The Biology Refugia) for link.

Photos from the Kent Ridge practical

2007-10-26T01:06:04Z

Click to view on Flickr.