Hundreds of bonfires dotted the Baltic Sea coast of Estonia on Saturday night, not only as a celebration of a maritime tradition that guided seafarers safely to land but to draw attention to the plight of the Baltic Sea and its threatened marine ecosystem.
Popular Estonian blogger, Mairold Vaik, set up an interactive[url=http:// http://www.ancientlights.eu/ t=_blank] Ancient Bonfires website, and signed up revelers from as far away as Finland, Sweden, Latvia and Russia to be part of the event this year. He told reporters that while the website got several hundred hits this year, he hopes to create a ring of bonfires around the Baltic Sea by 2018.
Vaik’s sole mission is to draw the world’s attention to the serious environmental challenges of the Baltic Sea. The Baltic is the most threatened marine ecosystem ion the planet. The WWF has been working for a number of years to enlightening the public on the threats to the Baltic’s ecosystems, and the remedial efforts available.
The Baltic Sea
The Baltic Sea is one of the planet’s largest bodies of brackish water, measuring 1,601 kilometers (995 miles) in length and 193 kilometers (120 miles) in width. The Sea’s average depth is about 55 meters (180 feet) but its maximum depth is 459 meters or 1,506 feet. It receives a mix of salt water from the Northeast Atlantic and fresh water from surrounding rivers and streams, creating a delicate marine ecosystem.
This massive body of water has a shoreline of 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) that touches on the coastlines of nine countries, including Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia and Sweden, home to 85 million people. Many of these people are dependent on the Baltic Sea for their livelihoods and recreation.
Environmental changes in the Baltic Sea
The Baltic Sea has been exposed to many stressors, including eutrophication, organic pollutants, overfishing, invasive species and acidification. Possibly the worst has been eutrophication, caused by the run-off of fertilizers from agricultural practices. This has caused algae blooms every summer for well over 10 to 15 years.
Organic pollutants, such as hydrocarbons, PCBs and insecticides have also been a problem for years in the Baltic. As a matter of fact, a quarter of the seafloor in the Baltic is a variable dead zone, with denser seawater remaining on the bottom, isolating the area from the surface water and the atmosphere.
Believe it or not, but it took ten years and countless negotiations for the WWF to finally succeed in getting the dumping of raw sewage into the Baltic from passenger ships stopped, and that was accomplished in April of this year. Even still, the regulations won’t go into effect until 2019 for new passenger ships and in 2021 for existing passenger ships.
Deteriorating environmental conditions have stressed the fauna of the Baltic, from the stranding of leatherback turtles to an overall decrease in a number of fish species such as lake herring, cod, pike and perch. Eutrophication has also created a change in the production of phytoplankton, part of the marine food change, and this is leading to a decline in some fish species.
So these are some of the reasons why our Estonian blogger wants to get more people involved in Baltic Sea conservation efforts, and Mr. Vaik deserves a big Green Thumps Up for his efforts.
