
Scientists are racing to discover the depth of ocean damage sparked by the LA wildfires
On a recent Sunday, Tracy Quinn drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to assess damage wrought upon the coastline by the Palisades Fire.
The water line was darkened by ash. Burnt remnants of washing machines and dryers and metal appliances were strewn about the shoreline. Sludge carpeted the water's edge. Waves during high tide lapped onto charred homes, pulling debris and potentially toxic ash into the ocean as they receded.
"It was just heartbreaking," said Quinn, president and CEO of the environmental group Heal the Bay, whose team has reported ash and debris some 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of the Palisades burn area west of Los Angeles.
As crews work to remove potentially hundreds of thousands of tons of hazardous materials from the Los Angeles wildfires, researchers and officials are trying to understand how the fires on land have impacted the sea. The Palisades and Eaton fires scorched thousands of homes, businesses, cars and electronics, turning everyday items into hazardous ash made of pesticides, asbestos, plastics, lead, heavy metals and more.
Since much of it could end up in the Pacific Ocean, there are concerns and many unknowns about how the fires could affect life under the sea.
"We haven't seen a concentration of homes and buildings burned so close to the water," Quinn said.
Fire debris and potentially toxic ash could make the water unsafe for surfers and swimmers, especially after rainfall that can transport chemicals, trash and other hazards into the sea. Longer term, scientists worry if and how charred urban contaminants will affect the food supply.
The atmospheric river and mudslides that pummeled the Los Angeles region last week exacerbated some of those fears.
When the fires broke out in January, one of Mara Dias' first concerns was ocean water contamination. Strong winds were carrying smoke and ash far beyond the blazes before settling at sea, said the water quality manager for the Surfrider Foundation, an environmental nonprofit.
Scientists on board a research vessel during the fires detected ash and waste on the water as far as 100 miles (161 kilometers) offshore, said marine ecologist Julie Dinasquet with the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Things like twigs and shard. They described the smell as electronics burning, she recalled, "not like a nice campfire."
Runoff from rains also are a huge and immediate concern. Rainfall picks up contaminants and trash while flushing toward the sea through a network of drains and rivers. That runoff could contain "a lot of nutrients, nitrogen and phosphate that end up in the ash of the burn material that can get into the water," said Dias, as well as "heavy metals, something called PAHs, which are given off when you burn different types of fuel."
Mudslides and debris flows in the Palisades Fire burn zone also can dump more hazardous waste into the ocean. After fires, the soil in burn scars is less able to absorb rainfall and can develop a layer that repels water from the remains of seared organic material. When there is less organic material to hold the soil in place, the risks of mudslides and debris flows increase.
Los Angeles County officials, with help from other agencies, have set thousands of feet of concrete barriers, sandbags, silt socks and more to prevent debris from reaching beaches. The LA County Board of Supervisors also recently passed a motion seeking state and federal help to expand beach clean ups, prepare for storm runoff and test ocean water for potential toxins and chemicals, among other things.
Beyond the usual samples, state water officials and others are testing for total and dissolved metals such as arsenic, lead and aluminum and volatile organic compounds.
They also are sampling for microplastics, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, that are harmful to human and aquatic life, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a group of man-made chemicals shown to cause cancer in animals and other serious health effects. Now banned from being manufactured, they were used in products like pigments, paints and electrical equipment.
County public health officials said chemical tests of water samples last month did not raise health concerns, so they downgraded one beach closure to an ocean water advisory. Beachgoers were still advised to stay out of the water.
Dinasquet and colleagues are working to understand how far potentially toxic ash and debris dispersed across the ocean, how deep and how fast they sunk and, over time, where it ends up.
Forest fires can deposit important nutrients like iron and nitrogen into the ocean ecosystem, boosting the growth of phytoplankton, which can create a positive, cascading effect across the ecosystem. But the potentially toxic ash from urban coastal fires could have dire consequences, Dinasquet said.
"Reports are already showing that there was a lot of lead and asbestos in the ash," she added. "This is really bad for people so its probably also very bad for the marine organisms."
A huge concern is whether toxic contaminants from the fire will enter the food chain. Researchers plan to take tissue fragments from fish for signs of heavy metals and contaminants. But they say it will take a while to understand how a massive urban fire will affect the larger ecosystem and our food supply.
Dias noted the ocean has long taken in pollution from land, but with fires and other disasters, "everything is compounded and the situation is even more dire."
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Scientific American
4 hours ago
- Scientific American
Brain Implant Lets Man with ALS Speak and Sing with His ‘Real Voice'
A man with a severe speech disability is able to speak expressively and sing using a brain implant that translates his neural activity into words almost instantly. The device conveys changes of tone when he asks questions, emphasizes the words of his choice and allows him to hum a string of notes in three pitches. The system — known as a brain–computer interface (BCI) — used artificial intelligence (AI) to decode the participant's electrical brain activity as he attempted to speak. The device is the first to reproduce not only a person's intended words but also features of natural speech such as tone, pitch and emphasis, which help to express meaning and emotion. In a study, a synthetic voice that mimicked the participant's own spoke his words within 10 milliseconds of the neural activity that signalled his intention to speak. The system, described today in Nature, marks a significant improvement over earlier BCI models, which streamed speech within three seconds or produced it only after users finished miming an entire sentence. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. 'This is the holy grail in speech BCIs,' says Christian Herff, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. 'This is now real, spontaneous, continuous speech.' Real-time decoder The study participant, a 45-year-old man, lost his ability to speak clearly after developing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of motor neuron disease, which damages the nerves that control muscle movements, including those needed for speech. Although he could still make sounds and mouth words, his speech was slow and unclear. Five years after his symptoms began, the participant underwent surgery to insert 256 silicon electrodes, each 1.5-mm long, in a brain region that controls movement. Study co-author Maitreyee Wairagkar, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues trained deep-learning algorithms to capture the signals in his brain every 10 milliseconds. Their system decodes, in real time, the sounds the man attempts to produce rather than his intended words or the constituent phonemes — the subunits of speech that form spoken words. 'We don't always use words to communicate what we want. We have interjections. We have other expressive vocalizations that are not in the vocabulary,' explains Wairagkar. 'In order to do that, we have adopted this approach, which is completely unrestricted.' The team also personalized the synthetic voice to sound like the man's own, by training AI algorithms on recordings of interviews he had done before the onset of his disease. The team asked the participant to attempt to make interjections such as 'aah', 'ooh' and 'hmm' and say made-up words. The BCI successfully produced these sounds, showing that it could generate speech without needing a fixed vocabulary. Freedom of speech Using the device, the participant spelt out words, responded to open-ended questions and said whatever he wanted, using some words that were not part of the decoder's training data. He told the researchers that listening to the synthetic voice produce his speech made him 'feel happy' and that it felt like his 'real voice'. In other experiments, the BCI identified whether the participant was attempting to say a sentence as a question or as a statement. The system could also determine when he stressed different words in the same sentence and adjust the tone of his synthetic voice accordingly. 'We are bringing in all these different elements of human speech which are really important,' says Wairagkar. Previous BCIs could produce only flat, monotone speech. 'This is a bit of a paradigm shift in the sense that it can really lead to a real-life tool,' says Silvia Marchesotti, a neuroengineer at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. The system's features 'would be crucial for adoption for daily use for the patients in the future.'


Miami Herald
20 hours ago
- Miami Herald
Invasive bullfrogs ‘eat everything' — including turtles — at Yosemite, study says
A study has found that removing invasive bullfrogs from Yosemite National Park ponds has generated a resurgence in the population of native pond turtles, experts said. When University of California, Davis, researchers first began studying four ponds at the park, they were overwhelmed by non-native American bullfrogs, a news release said. 'At night, you could look out over the pond and see a constellation of eyes blinking back at you,' said Sidney Woodruff, a UC Davis Ph.D. candidate and lead author of the study. 'Their honking noise is iconic, and it drowns out native species' calls.' The invasive frogs had decimated the native population of northwestern pond turtles, according to the study, published in the May issue of the journal Biological Conservation. Together with the southwestern pond turtle, northwestern pond turtles are the only native freshwater turtles in California, the university said. Northwestern pond turtles have vanished from over half their range, which stretches from Baja California to Washington state. At Yosemite, the only surviving turtles in the ponds surveyed were the ones that were too big for bullfrogs to eat, the study found. American bullfrogs are native to the eastern United States but don't belong in the West. 'One reason American bullfrogs are among the top worst globally introduced pests is because they eat everything — anything that fits into their mouth,' said senior author Brian Todd, a UC Davis professor in the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology. 'They've been causing declines to native species everywhere they're introduced, which is around the world.' The bullfrogs were introduced to Yosemite National Park in the 1950s and quickly spread throughout the park, researchers said. While their arrival was believed to be linked to the decline in pond turtles, it wasn't confirmed until the study took place, according to researchers. Between 2016 and 2022, researchers monitored four ponds at Yosemite, two with bullfrogs and two without, the study said. Turtles were 2 to 100 times more prevalent at the ponds where bullfrogs were absent, researchers said. When bullfrogs were removed from the other two ponds in 2019, researchers found juvenile pond turtles in them for the first time, the study said. 'As bullfrog presence declined, we started to hear other native frogs call and see native salamanders walking around,' Woodruff said. 'It's nice to be able to go back to these sites and hear a chorus of native frogs calling again that previously would not have been heard.' The Western Pond Turtle Range-wide Conservation Coalition, Yosemite Conservancy, U.S. Geological Survey and USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture funded the study.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Still Not Feeling the Same After COVID-19? You're Not Alone
Credit - Getty Images Most people have put the COVID-19 pandemic behind them. Infections, vaccinations, or a combination of both have bolstered people's immunity, and while new variants continue to pop up, getting sick does not induce the same panic it once did. But a new study shows that recovery from COVID-19 might not be as quick or straightforward as most of us now expect. The study, published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases, found that on average, it takes many people up to three months to return to good physical health after a COVID-19 infection, and nine months to recover good mental well-being. For up to 20% of infected people who were analyzed in the study, this mental-health recovery took even longer: up to a year or more. Lauren Wisk, assistant professor in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles, and her team looked at data from people who had COVID-19 at eight health facilities across the U.S. from Dec. 2020 to Aug. 2022. People were asked to fill out surveys every three months for one year about their recovery, recording physical and mental symptoms like anxiety, depression, fatigue, social participation, sleep disturbances, and pain. It took people far longer to regain their mental well-being than it did their physical health. 'To be totally honest, we didn't necessarily expect to see different recovery trajectories as big as the ones we are seeing,' says Wisk. 'While it makes sense that some people recover faster physically, and other people recover faster mentally, on average the difference that we saw was surprising.' Read More: You Could Have Long COVID and Not Even Know It Wisk and her team also asked people to self-report if they experienced Long COVID, meaning symptoms stemming from their infection that lingered for at least three months. Nearly half of people who reported both poor physical and mental qualify of life following their infections also believed they had Long COVID. While the assessment was subjective, it tracked with the data Wisk's team collected; among people who reported just poor physical health, poor mental health, or neither, there were fewer reports of Long COVID. The findings point to the need for a deeper understanding of how COVID-19 infections affect the body, physically and mentally, in the short and long term, says Wisk. 'We need to be thinking about a longer road to recovery for people, because even if someone recovers physically from their symptoms, it might not end there for them.' Appreciating these longer lasting effects could help people seek treatment for their symptoms, which may condense their recovery period. Wisk says that short courses of anxiety medications and sleep therapies, for example, could address some of the lingering effects of COVID-19. 'We know how to treat the initial infection and how to keep people alive, but we don't have a great treatment protocol for the after effects and the lingering symptoms,' says Wisk. 'These data should help to guide development of protocols in which we think of recovery over a potentially long time horizon before people get back to normal.' Contact us at letters@