The Indian Coast Guard on Monday asked Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) not to use sea water for its facilities in wake of the oil spill following collision of two vessels off the Mumbai coast.

BARC uses sea water for its two research reactors — Dhruva and Cirus – for cooling purposes.

“We have asked BARC not to use sea water for any of their facilities as it is polluted with oil spill from vessels after a collision on Saturday,” a senior Coast Guard official said on condition of anonymity.

“Sea water should not be used for cooling as oil spill has reached the beaches of Alibag, Marva, Sewree and Elephanta Caves besides Mumbai mangroves,” the official said.

Meanwhile, BARC sources said the two research reactors are currently operating and scientists are constantly monitoring the water physically and scientifically before using it for cooling.

Senior officials from Reactor Group at BARC were not available for comment on account of an emergency meeting.

Two Panamanian cargo ships– MSC Chitra and Merchant Vessel Khalija – collided off the Mumbai coast on August 7, causing an oil-spill from one of the vessels.

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About 16,500 chilli farmers in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, have received the first-ever insurance claim under the Weather-based Crop Insurance Scheme launched by the Agriculture Insurance Company (AIC) for chilli farmers. The scheme covered events like deficit rainfall, excess rainfall and uneven distribution of rainfall. It calculates the crop damages with village as a unit as against block, mandal or district in the other agriculture insurance scheme.

Chief Minister K Rosaiah received a cheque for Rs 17.34 crore from M Prasad, chairman and managing director of AIC, in Hyderabad on Tuesday, towards insurance claims for the farmers for the lost crop during the kharif season last year. As the weather-based insurance scheme provided better coverage, Rosaiah said the government had decided to extend the scheme to all the districts from this season. The state has now extended the scheme to cotton, oil palm and sweet lime in several districts.

Addressing a press conference, N Raghuveera Reddy, minister for agriculture, said the farmers in 38 mandals of Guntur were benefited. “This year, we have extended the weather-based cover to cotton farmers in Adilabad, Khammam and Warangal districts, sweet lime in Nalgonda districts, palm oil in West Godavari district and mangoes in Chittoor and Rangareddy district,” he added.

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A US-backed proposal to ban the international trade of polar bear skins, teeth and claws was defeated today at a UN wildlife meeting over concerns it would hurt indigenous economies and arguments the practice didn’t pose a significant threat to the animals.

The Americans argued at the 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, that the sale of polar bears skins is compounding the loss of the animals’ sea ice habitat due to climate change.

There are projections that the bear’s numbers, which are estimated at 20,000 to 25,000, could decline by two-thirds due by 2050 due to habitat loss in the Arctic.

“We’re disappointed,” said Jane Lyder, the Department of Interior’s deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks.

“But we understand that CITES is still trying to understand how to incorporate climate change into its decision making.

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Since 1900, global sea levels have crept upward about seven inches. Rising temperatures are melting glaciers and ice sheets, as well as warming the oceans directly, which causes them to expand. Various researchers have attributed only a portion of the rise in water level to carbon dioxide (CO2)released by human actions—and blamed the rest on natural factors such as solar activity. The latest study goes much further, faulting people for more than three-quarters of the sea-level change during the past century.

Records of tide height have been kept for centuries at several seaports (Amsterdam since 1700, Liverpool since 1768, Stockholm since 1774, and many other places since 1850). Such long records have enabled Svetlana Jevrejeva, of the British government’s Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool, and two colleagues to statistically model the influence of various factors on sea level during the past three centuries, and to extrapolate the findings over the past millennium.

The team found that up until about 1800, sea levels actually fell owing to volcanic eruptions that periodically injected ash into the atmosphere, veiling the Sun and cooling the Earth. But as the waters rose after 1850, the biggest contributing factor was increasing atmospheric CO2.

Significantly, Jevrejeva’s team calculated that without the ongoing, mitigating effects of volcanic activity since 1880, sea levels would now be about three inches higher than they are.

This research was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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