Russia
Of Baltic Jewels And Bad
Herrings by copydude
Russia has spoken out against a Caspian pipeline which would bypass Russia.
‘Any gas or oil pipelines across the floor of the Caspian Sea would be
environmentally unacceptable’, says the Russian Natural Resources Ministry.
‘Double standards’ says everyone else, as
Russia builds a pipeline on the Baltic floor to bypass Poland.
As it happens, the Baltic isn’t in good shape. The Baltic is what they call
‘pollution sensitive.’ It’s almost as closed as the Caspian, since water
renewal takes 25 - 30 years. There are, however, greater threats than
pipelines.
One threat is the amber mine in Kaliningrad. Sewage produced by the Yantarny
plant is one of the world’s biggest culprits in the environmental crime of . .
. anthropogenic suspended material expulsion. Basically, the sea cannot
dissolve the waste and becomes turbid, impeding the natural flow of water.
It is estimated that Kaliningrad has around 90 per cent of the world’s
deposits of natural amber. Amber is a very beautiful metalloid - another new
word I learned today - but mining is a fairly crude process. The shore is
dredged and the sediment loaded on to freight cars. In old tin sheds, high
pressure hoses separate the amber from the sludge. The sludge is returned to
cloud and stagnate the sea.
Although amber has a reputation of being ‘rare and precious’, most of what is
extracted is poor quality and goes into making varnish, oil and acids. Only
about 10 per cent is ’sparkler quality’.
The other major threat to the Balltic is agricultural run-off, in the form of
nitrates from EU intensive farming. In Autumn 2002, thousands of dead fish
were washed ashore along the east coast of Jutland, Denmark. Thanks to the
nitrates, those that are left are breathing with difficulty.
So, along with anthropogenic suspended material expulsion you can add
exceptional oxygen depletion to your environmentalist vocabulary, as well as
eutrophication - a condition in which the sea contains too high a level of
fertilizer. How appropriate that the word begins with ‘EU’.
Anyway, I’m off to Kaliningrad again shortly. Think I should order the fish?
Alexa Demi Cup Bra
Ambra
