Weather Forecasting Is Deadly for Marine Wildlife
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Latex balloons designed to collect high-altitude data become a threat to marine animals after they burst—though the scale of their impact remains unknown.
On a fall day in 2023, a juvenile Atlantic yellow-nosed albatross was lying listless in southeastern Brazil’s Santos Basin. Beach monitors found the young bird in the sand, weak and hypothermic. The cause of the albatross’s misery was evident: it was caught in a weather balloon. The balloon’s string, still attached to a radio transmitter, had gouged into the bird’s flesh—fracturing bones, killing tissues, and cutting off circulation to the bird’s feet. The albatross, too entangled to spread oil from its tail gland to its feathers for waterproofing, was soaked to the skin.
Staff from the nonprofit Albatross Project took the desperate bird to the organization’s rehabilitation center nearby, where veterinarian Daphne Goldberg and her colleagues examined the albatross and decided euthanasia was the only option. Albatrosses need their feet to paddle and fly—it would not have survived as an amputee. “It was a tragedy. It was awful,” Goldberg recalls.
Goldberg is the coauthor of a recent study about the impact weather-balloon debris is having on seabirds and marine animals. Globally, hundreds of thousands of weather balloons are launched into the sky every year, and the majority are never recovered. Instead, their waste—a mix of latex, cotton, and plastics—remains in marine ecosystems for years. And because only a small percentage of dead animals wash ashore, the impact is likely worse than the numbers suggest. “Probably there are a lot more [balloon entanglements],” Goldberg says.
Many countries use weather balloons to gather high-altitude data on air temperature, pressure, and humidity.
read more at hakaimagazine.com.
