'Alarming' Scale of Marine Sand Dredging Laid Bare by New Data Platform (theguardian.com) 64
One million lorries of sand a day are being extracted from the world's oceans, posing a "significant" threat to marine life and coastal communities facing rising sea levels and storms, according to the first-ever global data platform to monitor the industry. From a report: The new data platform, developed by the UN Environment Programme (Unep), tracks and monitors dredging of sand in the marine environment by using the AIS (automatic identification systems) data from ships. Using data from 2012-19, Marine Sand Watch estimates the dredging industry is digging up 6bn tonnes of marine sand a year, a scale described as "alarming." The rate of extraction is growing globally, Unep said, and is approaching the natural rate of replenishment of 10bn to 16bn tonnes of sand flowing into the sea from rivers and needed to maintain coastal structure and ecosystems.
The platform has identified "hotspots" including the North Sea, south-east Asia and the east coast of the United States as areas of concern. In many places where extraction is more intense, including parts of Asia, marine sand is being extracted well beyond the rate at which it is being replenished from rivers. [...] Developed by GRID-Geneva, a centre for analytics within Unep, Marine Sand Watch has trained artificial intelligence to identify the movement of dredging vessels from its AIS data. It has data from 2012-19 from Global Fishing Watch, a company set up to track commercial fishing activities using AIS data from fishing vessels, but is working on more recent data.
The platform has identified "hotspots" including the North Sea, south-east Asia and the east coast of the United States as areas of concern. In many places where extraction is more intense, including parts of Asia, marine sand is being extracted well beyond the rate at which it is being replenished from rivers. [...] Developed by GRID-Geneva, a centre for analytics within Unep, Marine Sand Watch has trained artificial intelligence to identify the movement of dredging vessels from its AIS data. It has data from 2012-19 from Global Fishing Watch, a company set up to track commercial fishing activities using AIS data from fishing vessels, but is working on more recent data.
"One Million Lorries" - WTH? (Score:5, Funny)
Please stick to standard units - e.g. Football Fields or Libraries of Congress.
Re: (Score:1)
I knew a Lorrie once... she was a bit promiscuous. But I don't understand how to convert average penises encountered per year to containers of sand. Is there an inches to cubic meters factor I can use?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I knew a Lorrie once... she was a bit promiscuous. But I don't understand how to convert average penises encountered per year to containers of sand. Is there an inches to cubic meters factor I can use?
After sex on the beach, how much sand was Lorrie carrying, internally and externally? That's the standard Laurie sand unit.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the standard Laurie sand unit.
The standard Laurie unit is how much fits in a House.
Re: (Score:1)
Some idiot modded me troll for this. It might not have been funny, but clearly they have never seen a troll.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
At least football fields and Libraries of Congress are consistent.
Football fields is not consistent. Where the word "lorry" is commonly used, a "Football field" is a different size (and different sport) than an American Football field. Down Under, it isn't even one size.
Re:"One Million Lorries" - WTH? (Score:4, Funny)
Please stick to standard units - e.g. Football Fields or Libraries of Congress.
A lorry holds about 21,000 kg.
Therefore 1e6 * 2.1e4 / .118 = 1.78e+11 or 178 billion bananas per day worth of sand.
Re: (Score:2)
A lorry holds about 21,000 kg.
Therefore 1e6 * 2.1e4 / .118 = 1.78e+11 or 178 billion bananas per day worth of sand.
Wait, I thought bananas were a measure of radiation [wikipedia.org], not mass.
Math Fairy (Score:2)
And they complain about football fields (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
It means truck in British.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
What you really care about it its unladen speed though...
Re:And they complain about football fields (Score:4, Informative)
And in this case, it'd be about 7-10 cubic meters of sand per truck/lorrie.
Re: (Score:2)
And in this case, it'd be about 7-10 cubic meters of sand per truck/lorrie.
Are they all a standard size? There are so many different sizes of what we call dump trucks here in the states. It's like a football field or soccer pitch can be visualized, but a road legal dum truck would fit inside one of the the big ones. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8N9... [blogspot.com]
Anyhow, thanks for the measurement. I can conceptualize that.
Re: (Score:2)
No, they're not all a standard size over there either. That's why there's like a 30% range between the two amounts.
I just did a common range for road legal ones. If you're involving dump trucks big enough to have small offices as cabs... The numbers vary.
I'm not sure you could call a Caterpillar 797F to be a "lorry" any more.
Re: (Score:2)
In terms of bandwidth, how do sand trucks/lorries compare to a single station wagon full of VHS tapes traveling on the highway?
Re: (Score:2)
In terms of bandwidth, how do sand trucks/lorries compare to a single station wagon full of VHS tapes traveling on the highway?
Much more bandwidth but also more latency.
Re: (Score:2)
Sweet.
Now are we talking about a compact consumer pickup truck like a Ford Ranger? Or maybe a full-size pickup truck such as an F150 or Chevy Silverado? Or a heavy duty pickup truck like a F350? Bigger like an F550? 2.5 ton flat-bed truck? 5 ton dump truck? Huge mining loader that is the size of a house?
I'm pretty sure anyone could do the slang translation in about 4 seconds with Google. What was missing is context.
Re: (Score:2)
It means truck in British.
European or African truck?
Re: (Score:2)
It means truck in British.
No it doesn't. That would be a "lorry".(plural "lorrys").
Re: (Score:2)
It means truck in British.
No it doesn't. That would be a "lorry".(plural "lorrys").
The plural of "lorry" is actually "lorries".
On the other hand, when referring to ownership of an item by someone called "Lorrie" the word "Lorrie's" would be used.
Does it really have to be a wash though? (Score:2)
Article is kinda crabby, I mean they measure things in lorries.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, you're right that actually digging no sand out of the ocean would and has over the long term become problematic. A certain amount of erosion leads directly to sand being displaced from land and rivers into the ocean, and we do definitely need to have some plan to reverse that if we want to maintain our coastlines and waterways. I think the issue is that if you dig too much back out in one place though, and just leave a giant sub-oceanic pit somewhere, it can disrupt oceanic currents in an environmental
Wait a sec, rising sea levels? (Score:1)
Wouldn't removing lots of sand from the seabed, _counteract_ rising sea levels? That sand displaces water, or stops displacing it when removed, right? Wouldn't that have roughly the *opposite* effect or rising sea levels?
Note that I'm not suggesting we should deliberately screw up one thing in order to offset something else. That kind of approach tends to have unintended consequences.
But I do fail to see how the rising sea levels are contributing to or exacerbating how bad the amount of sand being remove
Re:Wait a sec, rising sea levels? (Score:4, Informative)
No, taking sand out of the oceans is not a good solution. Some of the other posters have calculated the amount of sand we're removing is something like 1% of the added volume from melting ice. There's no practical way to remove enough stuff from the ocean to make space for all that melting water.
Meanwhile, depositing sediment is important to fight coastal erosion. Currents and waves are constantly removing sand from beaches and washing it out into deeper parts of the ocean. Unless that sand is replenished, the coast will erode, making areas close to the coast more vulnerable to flooding from high tides and storm surges. This is really bad, because we tend to take the sand from close to where it will be used, meaning right by the big cities we're most worried about.
Re: (Score:2)
Meanwhile, depositing sediment is important to fight coastal erosion. Currents and waves are constantly removing sand from beaches and washing it out into deeper parts of the ocean. Unless that sand is replenished, the coast will erode, making areas close to the coast more vulnerable to flooding from high tides and storm surges. This is really bad, because we tend to take the sand from close to where it will be used, meaning right by the big cities we're most worried about.
Exactly correct. There is a lighthouse in North Carolina that has been used for coastal navigation since the ships had sails on them (finished in 1870), and not too long ago (1999) they had to undergo a project to lift the thing onto rails and move it 2900 feet inland [nps.gov] to it's current position on a new foundation, because the coastline has shifted about 1500 feet since it was built to where it was threatening the original historic foundation of the structure. I can't imagine that undergoing a project to li
Re: (Score:2)
Unless you are loading the sand into a rocket and firing it up out of the gravity well, that sand will end up back in the ocean someday. And even if we do start sending chunks of the sea bed into space, other sand will end up there to replace it because erosion of mountains is still a thing. And do you realize just how much sand you would have to dredge out in order to effect sea level rise? It would be the biggest engineering project ever undertaken by man, as you would have to remove enough sand to disp
Re: Wait a sec, rising sea levels? (Score:2)
I haven't checked your math, but here's mine. 70% of the Earth is covered by water. I assume this is all ocean water, I did not take fresh water into consideration. I asked GPT about how much volume is in a standard American dump truck two which it said 540 cubic feet. By my calculations, that means it would take 3.3 billion dump trucks of sediment and sand to counteract the projected 2 ft rise in ocean levels by 2100 if we do not lower emissions..
So if the world removed 1 million dump trucks worth of mater
Re: (Score:2)
Why are they mentioned here? It feels like a non sequitur.
it is. tbf that mention it's not in the article or original headline, but in msmash's editing. i guess it is somehow related inasmuch as coastal erosion impacts directly the same collective as rising sea levels, but yeah, it's foggy at best. not sure if it is there for added dramatism or else for added dramatism ;-)
Ya, but ... (Score:2)
One million lorries of sand a day are being extracted from the world's oceans, posing a "significant" threat to marine life and coastal communities facing rising sea levels and storms, ...
Unless this sand is being dumped back into the ocean elsewhere, doesn't that just make the ocean deeper, meaning it'll take longer for sea-level to rise on land? :-) [ie: If I have a deeper/bigger bathtub, it can hold more water before if overflows...] Sounds like a win-win for coastal communities. (I can heard it now: "Dredge-baby-dredge ...")
Re: (Score:2)
Okay, it looks like it'd be around 8 cubic meters of sand per lorrie, assuming the lorries are what those of us in the US call "dump trucks". So around 8 million cubic meters/day. Around 3 billion cubic meters/year.
https://www.bbc.com/news/scien... [bbc.com]
270 billion tonnes of ice melting per year. It's around 1 metric ton of water per cubic meter(depends on temperature, you see).
So 270-3 = 267B more tons of sand we need to extract.
Or, if we want to solve global warming by simply extracting enough sand/ocean bed
Re: Ya, but ... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What are you even trying to say? "heavier" isn't a distance measurement, and what's a "residense"?
While yes, this would increase the average height of the land, the problem is that existing locations will end up flooding too often. So unless we put that sand towards lifting them up, it isn't that helpful. So the primary effect would still be by removing the sand to increase the volume available for the water at given heights.
Re: (Score:3)
Greenland ice sheet lost 84Gt of ice over the 12 months from September 2021 to August 2022
Since sand is about 60% denser, you'd need to remove about 135Gt of sand to offset the that year's melt (the figure above from https://www.carbonbrief.org/gu... [carbonbrief.org] is the *net* loss of ice). With the Antarctic ice shelf roughly 10x bigger than that and experiencing roughly similar melting rates, you'd need to remove almost 1.5 *tera*tons of sand yearly, or about 250 times what the OP report indicates, just to keep things on an even keel. Unfortunately, even that figure is going to be increasing.
Seems like it should become public info already. (Score:2)
Why aren't all companies required to explain what they do today? At least when they impact shared resources (land, water, air, etc). The "cost" to report should be borne by the people trying to "profit" from the actions.
Sure... we didn't used to. It's a new day. We realize how useful this information is, and how most companies would already be tracking similar information. You don't want to run out suddenly, or have spikes and troughs of production if you can help it. So you track it...
How low is the
NoHo Hank strikes again (Score:2)
Good quality sand for concrete and glass is the next major black market. According to television.
Why Sand? Concrete? (Score:3)
<ul><li>Find a better place to get the sand
<li>Find a something to build with better than concrete</ul>
On a related note, they're dredging at Brigantine, NJ (just north of Atlantic City) to dump more sand on the beach. The beach has been eroded down to almost nothing, and if they don't do something, they'll lose the city. I think they do the beach replenishments every five or so years, depending on the rate of erosion.
It's a fascinating process. They have a large about the size of a barge that pumps sandy water from off-shore or at an inlet. That runs through a huge (6' or so diameter) pipe for about a mile to where it dumps out on the beach. Then they use bulldozers to push around the sand and level the beach, stopping occasionally to move and extend the pipes. I'm sure the salt water is destroying those bulldozers; I wonder if the contractor told the rental company how they were using them?
Re:Why Sand? Concrete? (Score:5, Informative)
From the summary, it seems clear that the sand is being extracted for industrial purposes. The most obvious one would be to mix with cement to make concrete.
It most definitely is not being used for concrete. Ocean sand is so rounded off that it makes exceedingly weak concrete. There was a scandal about it in China, and some collapsed buildings. River and ocean sand is wholly unsuitable for structural cement.
The vast majority of dredging is to keep shipping lanes open. Barge traffic on the Mississippi river accounts for half a billion tons of freight every single year and it's neither the largest nor the busiest river in the world. The streams and smaller rivers that make up the Mississippi river basin carry tons and tons of silt and sand into the river every year. The Army Corps of Engineers is in a constant battle with the silt accumulation. More beavers on small streams would help with that, to slow down the water farther upstream and allow the silt to fall out on the bottom of tributaries, but the North American beaver is an indiscriminate, if persistent, engineer, who will flood roads if not supervised.
Re: Why Sand? Concrete? (Score:2)
"the North American beaver is an indiscriminate, if persistent, engineer, who will flood roads if not supervised."
You can get them to build dams where you want them with audio recordings of running water.
Re: (Score:2)
From the summary, it seems clear that the sand is being extracted for industrial purposes. The most obvious one would be to mix with cement to make concrete.
It most definitely is not being used for concrete. Ocean sand is so rounded off that it makes exceedingly weak concrete. There was a scandal about it in China, and some collapsed buildings. River and ocean sand is wholly unsuitable for structural cement.
This is somewhat incorrect. To quote one of many sources on the subject: "Builder’s sand, also known as plasterer’s, bricklayer’s or mason sand, is soft sand used for a range of building and construction applications. Builder’s sand is usually found in riverbeds, lakes, ocean floors and beaches, formed over thousands of years, and is composed of silica from decomposed pieces of rock, coral, minerals, and shell, with the exact composition and colour depending on the local rock sources
Re: (Score:2)
Plus it would have to be desalinated to be used for normal concrete.
River sand better for concrete (Score:2)
Or about two cubic km of sand (Score:2)
And no, this won't make any difference in sea levels. Greenland alone is losing 270 cubic km of water a year and thermal expansion of the oceans is adding significantly more to the volume than that.
Re: (Score:1)
But but, what about all the reactionary benefit from big numbers and vague reporting! We have to focus on man-caused climate change, and without a clickbait article like this, we won't have much.
Won't this counteract rising sea levels? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly.
I say the same thing about "over-fishing".
Why is it alarming? (Score:2)
Either these schmucks are just trying to justify their salar
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)