HI34B:
The Impact of Seawater Desalination on the Marine Environment Posters


Session ID#: 9245

Session Description:
Freshwater is a rare commodity. More than a third of the world’s population lives in areas with water shortages that are vulnerable to drought. The increasing need for potable water, in conjunction with technological advances, has transformed large scale seawater desalination into a fast-growing industry worldwide.  In contrast to the rapid technological development, the long-term environmental impacts of desalination on the marine ecosystem have been poorly documented. Among the possible effects are entrainment and impingement of organisms at the intake, changes in the physico-chemical environment at the brine outfall (including chemicals used in the desalination process), and shifts in the biological communities. The scant published studies emphasize the effects of salinity on the benthic communities and those are site- and organism specific and provide conflicting results.

We invite abstracts that explore the impacts of seawater desalination on the physical, chemical, biological, and ecological aspects of the marine environment. We welcome a range of presentations covering in situ field measurements, controlled laboratory studies and modelling of seawater intake and brine discharge. Of special interest are studies integrating the different methodologies into a holistic view, an approach that is lacking in the literature, and is essential for future planning and regulation.

Primary Chair:  Nurit Kress, Israel Oceanographic & Limnological Res, National Institute of Oceanography, Haifa, Israel
Chairs:  Ilana Berman-Frank, Bar Ilan University, Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, Ramat Gan, Israel and Nadine Heck, University of California Santa Cruz, Institute of Marine Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA, United States
Moderators:  Nurit Kress, Israel Oceanographic & Limnological Res, National Institute of Oceanography, Haifa, Israel, Ilana Berman-Frank, Bar Ilan University, Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, Ramat Gan, Israel and Nadine Heck, University of California Santa Cruz, Institute of Marine Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA, United States
Student Paper Review Liaisons:  Nurit Kress, Israel Oceanographic & Limnological Res, National Institute of Oceanography, Haifa, Israel and Ilana Berman-Frank, Bar Ilan University, Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, Ramat Gan, Israel
Index Terms:

4251 Marine pollution [OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL]
4815 Ecosystems, structure, dynamics, and modeling [OCEANOGRAPHY: BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL]
6349 General or miscellaneous [POLICY SCIENCES]
Co-Sponsor(s):
  • EC - Estuarine and Coastal
  • ME - Marine Ecosystems

Abstracts Submitted to this Session:

 
Coastal Residents Perception of Seawater Desalination and Its Impacts on Coastal Ecosystems (87323)
Nadine Heck, University of California Santa Cruz, Institute of Marine Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA, United States, Adina Paytan, UCSC-Inst Marine Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA, United States and Donald Cameron Potts, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, United States
 
Marine monitoring at seawater desalination brine discharge sites: The challenge of doing it right (88572)
Nurit Kress and Efrat Shoham-Frider, IOLR, Haifa, Israel
 
Effects of Brine Discharges on Benthonic Microbes (89405)
Edo Bar-Zeev, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Environmental Hydrology & Microbiology, Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research (ZIWR), Israel
 
Vertical Mixing of Desalination Reject Brine that Accumulates in Local Depressions in a Tidal Environment (89016)
Aaron Chow, Ishita Shrivastava and Edward E Adams, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Cambridge, MA, United States
 
Influence of internal waves on the dispersion and transport of inclined gravity currents (90334)
Charlie Alan Renshaw Hogg1, Valerie B Pietrasz2, Nicholas T Ouellette1 and Jeffrey R Koseff3, (1)Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States, (2)California Institute of Technology, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, Pasadena, CA, United States, (3)Stanford University, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford, CA, United States
 
Impacts of effluent from Carlsbad Desalination Plant on the coastal biology and chemistry - a in-situ study of pre- and post-discharge. (87420)
Karen Lykkebo Petersen, University of California Santa Cruz, Earth and Planetary Science, Santa Cruz, CA, United States, Adina Paytan, UCSC-Inst Marine Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA, United States, Donald Cameron Potts, University of California-Santa Cruz, EEB, Santa Cruz, CA, United States and Nadine Heck, University of California Santa Cruz, Institute of Marine Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA, United States