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Western Coastal and Marine Geology | |||||||||
Fate of Dredge Disposal Material and Polluted Sediment, Offshore Honolulu, Hawaii |
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ISSUEFor more than a century, material dredged from Pearl and Honolulu Harbors has been dumped in Mamala Bay off Oahu, Hawaii. Human activities add other materials to the bay as well: wastewater from Honolulu and its suburbs, shipyard contaminants and lead paint from ships, agricultural fertilizers leached from fields. It is not known how the dredged material and contaminants are affecting the environment. In 1991, the USGS began studying the dredged material in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Our initial studies focused on mapping the material's distribution and thickness, determining its physical and chemical makeup, assessing its effect on seafloor life, finding out whether it is being moved by currents, and ultimately determining the fate of dredge material and associated contaminants. The results of our studies are available through this web site and a series of reports and publications.
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U.S. Department of the Interior U.S. Geological Survey
URL: http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/mamalabay/
Maintained by Laura Zink Torresan
Last modified 11 October 2005 (lzt)