Marine Mammals - Muscle Physiology

Harbor porpoise.  NOAA.

Marine mammals have the peculiar ability to "ignore" a buildup of lactic acid in their muscles.  While human muscles are highly susceptible to it (aka...muscle fatigue) marine mammal muscles are not.

I linked an excellent article from Scientific American to explain how it affects us:
Lactic Acid - Scientific American

As if sharks didn't have enough troubles right now...

A 'brilliant' (can you sense the sarcasm dripping from 'brilliant?') plan by the Australian government to curb the incredibly low rate of shark attacks.

Article courtesy of Scientific American and Nature.

Shark Cull Plan Draws Ire

Baited hooks in Western Australia, designed to catch and kill sharks, could damage vulnerable great white shark populations, researchers say

By Daniel Cressey and Nature magazine

 

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GREAT WHITE SHARK ATTACKS: After a number of high-profile incidents in Western Australia, plans have started for culling sharks in a “more aggressive” attempt to prevent attacks on humans.Image: Grant Peters/Flickr

Western Australia’s plan to start culling sharks in a “more aggressive” attempt to prevent attacks on humans could severely damage populations of threatened great whites, experts say. It is also based on an antiquated approach to the problem, shark researchers say, and seems to contradict the scientific advice given to the region’s government just last year.

“My immediate reaction is disgust”, says George Burgess, a noted shark researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. “This is an archaic response to this kind of a problem, and one most scientists thought had seen its day decades ago.”

The total number of shark attacks is extremely low. One 2011 study found an average of 1.1 fatalities per year in Australia over the past 20 years.

But after a number of high-profile attacks in Western Australia — six of them fatal in the past two years — the government of the region said earlier this week that it would start deploying ‘drum lines’ 1 kilometer offshore of popular beaches in January. These lines consist of a baited hook hanging from a float that is anchored to the sea bed, with the aim of catching and killing sharks. In addition, ‘management zones’ will be set up around some beaches, and any large shark venturing into these zones will be killed.

Scientific objections to such a program of culling sharks center on the fact that in order to reduce attacks, a substantial number of animals will have to be removed, which will have a serious impact on the survival of already threatened species in the region. “If they take enough sharks out of the water, sure it’s going to reduce shark attacks,” says Burgess. “If you get all of them out of the water you’ll never have a shark attack again.”

Three species of shark are responsible for most attacks on humans: the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), which is rated as a species vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier), which is rated as near-threatened, and the bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas), which is also rated as near-threatened.

A report prepared for the government of Western Australia last year by Daryl McPhee, a fisheries researcher at Bond University in Gold Coast, Australia, warned that control programs would have “potential implications for the populations of any currently threatened marine species” and could also pose a risk to dolphins. It concluded that: “Due to the environmental impacts of shark control activities, it is not recommended that either shark nets [or] drum-lines be introduced into Western Australia.”

Globally, only three major shark control programs are currently in operation that use drum lines, nets or a combination of the two. Two of them are in Australia (in Queensland and New South Wales) and the other is in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. But the announcement of a new program in Western Australia has again focused debate on the controversial practice, not least because the region is thought to be migration route for great whites.

Alison Kock, a shark-control researcher and a marine biologist with the Shark Spotters program, which aims to spot and alert water users to sharks off the Cape Peninsula in South Africa, said in an e-mail to Nature that the KwaZulu-Natal program has “undeniably reduced the risk” of shark attacks. But this has come at an environmental cost. Culling, she says, is not an appropriate response to shark attacks, and “the targeted culling of a threatened species, like the white shark, is especially environmentally irresponsible”.

Shark attacks often attract huge publicity, but the risk of death from these animals is low compared to other causes of death. For comparison, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1,522 people died in transport accidents in Australia in 2011, 1,845 died in falls and several died after being bitten by dogs (the exact number is concealed to protect individual confidentiality).

However, an increasing human population and an increase in the number of people taking to the water for recreation has pushed up the overall number of shark attacks in Australia from 6.5 per year in the 1990s to 15 per year in the 2000s.

“We need to consider that we’re visitors to that marine environment,” says Burgess. “The question it comes down to is more of a moral choice: are we willing to alter the natural system to the point of breakage, at least in terms of particular species, for the safety of a human who is invading that foreign world?”

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on December 13, 2013.

Sea Star Die-off

The following article appeared on Scientific American's website.  The original article is courtesy of Nature.

Clues Sought for Sea Star Die-Off

An outbreak has devastated several species along North America's Pacific Coast this year

By Danielle Venton and Nature magazine

 

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DERMASTERIAS IMBRICATA: Biologists are searching for the cause of a mysterious and unprecedented die-off of sea stars along the Pacific coast of North America.Image: Ed Bierman/Flickr

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In their waterproof orange overalls, Hannah Perlkin and Emily Tucker look like commercial fishermen or storm-ready sailors. But they are biologists on their way to tide pools along a remote stretch of northern California coast. There they are searching for the cause of a mysterious and unprecedented die-off of sea stars along North America’s Pacific shores.

The syndrome took marine scientists by surprise this summer, when sick and dying sea stars — also known as starfish — appeared in a host of locations between Alaska and southern California. Predatory species were the first to succumb, but now the mysterious ailment is appearing in species once thought to be resistant to its effects.

The progression is predictable: white lesions appear on an animal and become infected. Within hours or days the sea star becomes limp, and its arms may fall off. Necrosis eventually takes over and the animal dies.

“It’s like a zombie wasteland,” says Tucker, who is, like Perlkin, a field technician employed by the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). “You'll see detached arms crawling away from their body.”

Among the animals now affected are the scavenger bat star, Asterina miniata; some species of sea urchin, an important source of food for threatened sea otters; and recreational and commercially fished species such as the California spiny lobster (Panulirus interruptus) and sheephead fish (Semicossyphus pulcher).

Scientists worry about the long-term ecological consequences of the outbreak, which has affected a larger area and more species than episodes that occurred in 1983 and 1997. Sea-star populations took decades to return to their former numbers after those episodes, which were associated with warmer waters caused by El Niño. The latest outbreak began despite relatively cold surface waters along the Pacific coast for the past 15 years. Sea-star wasting disease has also been reported at sites along the US eastern coast this year, but researchers say that it is too early to link the outbreaks.

Searching for probable cause
Pinning down the cause of the outbreak is a high-stakes detective game for researchers such as Pete Raimondi, an ecologist at UCSC. He leads a marine-monitoring programme that has received special funding from the nonprofit organization Ocean Science Trust, based in Oakland, California, to search for the source of the outbreak.

Raimondi is working to map the presence and severity of the wasting disease along the Pacific coast, using observations by Perlkin and Tucker, long-term monitoring data and reports from researchers and interested citizens, to map the outbreak’s ebb and flow. “Once we can determine if there are multiple points of initiation or just one,” Raimondi says, “we can look for links to reasons why sea stars are suddenly susceptible.”

Other researchers are working with sea stars to determine whether wasting is an autoimmune condition or caused by an infectious agent. At UCSC, disease ecologist Marm Kilpatrick is beginning a series of experiments in which sick stars are separated from apparently healthy ones by various types of barrier, in hopes of characterizing the disease culprit and how it spreads.

Among the possible causes scientists have suggested for the wasting syndrome are low oxygen levels in coastal waters, localized areas of warm water and environmental toxins. Some researchers have suggested that ocean acidification is a possible factor, but Raimondi says that is unlikely, given that acidification is pervasive but the disease outbreak is occurring in patches.

Farther north, at Western Washington University in Bellingham, biologist Benjamin Miner is collecting sick and healthy sea stars from sites along the coast to be analysed by Ian Hewson, a microbial oceanographer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Hewson is comparing the colonies of viruses, bacteria and protozoa that live in and on diseased and normal sea stars, looking for a common ‘fingerprint’ that identifies the disease.

Perlkin and Tucker plan to continue surveying the Pacific coast until the end of next May. “I’m pretty confident we’ll soon figure out what this is,” says Perlkin. “It just takes a while for all the right people to start working together.”

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on December 13, 2013.

Where Has All The Sea Ice Gone?

Thanks to nationalgeographic.com for the article below. In addition to impacts
on organisms, the lack of sea ice has interested nearby nations in
shipping and mining.

Arctic Shipping Soars, Led by Russia and Lured by Energy

The Yamal is one of Russia's four powerful nuclear icebreakers, part of a fleet of 37 icebreakers that provide escort along the Northern Sea Route.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WHITE, CORBIS

Marianne Lavelle

National Geographic

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 29, 2013

A momentous season is ending for the world's newest nautical shortcut.

Stable ice began forming in mid-October along the coast of Siberia's Yamal Peninsula, the large landmass north of the Arctic Circle that juts into the Kara Sea. The freeze was expected to spread steadily west and southwest, inundating Kara Strait (map) by this week.

Once nature closes that narrow passage to the Barents Sea, it effectively shuts down until next summer the entrance to Russia's Northern Sea Route (NSR), the 3,000-mile (4,828-kilometer) east-west passage between Europe and Asia that global warming has made possible. (See related "Quiz: What You Don't Know About Energy in the Changing Arctic.")

Never mind that Arctic sea ice rebounded 30 percent this year from its 2012 record low. (See related, "Summer Arctic Sea Ice Recovers From 2012, But Trend Is 'Decidedly' Down.") Seventy-one ships completed "transits," or complete journeys between the Barents Sea and the Bering Strait, up more than 50 percent from last year, according to Rosatomflot, Russia's state-operated nuclear-powered icebreaker fleet, which provides mandatory escort—for a fee. As recently as 2010, only four ships made the crossing. (Voice your opinion, "Arctic Development: What Do We Urgently Need to Know?")

A Year of Firsts

This year marked the first NSR transit for a container ship, and the premier voyages for vessels commissioned by China and South Korea.

Russia conducted naval exercises on the NSR for the second straight year, and capped the September flotilla with an announcement that the Kremlin would reopen an old Soviet Arctic military base.

Click here for interactive map: The Changing Arctic

Two other milestones, uncelebrated, were just as significant for the Arctic's future: the first tanker accident of the NSR's new era and the first act of civil disobedience. No spills or injuries were reported in the crash of Russia's Nordvik into an ice floe, but the rescue took more than a week as the stricken ship's owners haggled with Rosatomflot over cost.

The Greenpeace icebreaker Arctic Sunrise entered the NSR in defiance of authorities who denied them passage before staging a protest on a nearby floating Gazprom oil rig. The 28 activists and two freelance journalists from 16 different countries were initially charged with piracy and imprisoned for weeks in Murmansk and then St. Petersburg. The charges were reduced to hooliganism and all of the protesters were freed on bail over the past week, but not before the incident escalated into an international diplomatic conflict.

The tanker and Greenpeace incidents underscore a reality about the new era of Arctic shipping often overlooked both in official Russian pronouncements and international media coverage of the transit firsts. Although the Arctic provides a shorter route around the world than the traditional course through warmer waters, it is not necessarily cheaper. That's why experts believe that the first surge of new ship traffic in the Arctic will be focused on these harsh seas as a potentially lucrative destination rather than as a passage; their aim will be extraction of the wealth of minerals, oil, and natural gas that are now accessible due to global warming. (See related coverage: "The Arctic: The Science of Change.")

Old Route, New Ambition

Although the notion of the NSR as an international shipping lane is new, there's a long history of Arctic navigation, particularly in the icy waters north of Russia. Indigenous people traversed the Arctic by boat for thousands of years in search of food, supplies, and potential settlement areas, notes a major assessment of Arctic shipping commissioned in 2009 by the Arctic Council, a cooperative organization of the eight Arctic states.

From the 1490s, European and Russian explorers searched for both a Northwest Passage and a Northeast Passage.

Norwegian Roald Amundsen is credited with making the first successful complete transit of the Northwest Passage in 1906, a journey he survived over three harsh Canadian winters only with the help of the native Inuit.

While the Northwest Passage has seen increased activity—this year a bulk freighter delivering coal from Vancouver to Finland was the first vessel of its kind to transit—experts believe its prospects as a global sea route are far weaker than those of Russia's NSR.  Canada's Arctic archipelago, comprised of 36,000 islands, islets, and rocks, one of the most complex geographies on Earth, is a major impediment. And the Northwest Passage lacks the NSR's history of development.

After the Russian revolution, Vladimir Lenin directed the development of the NSR. At first devoted to fishing and transport of food and other supplies to and from the Siberian settlements devoted to coal and mineral development, the NSR later served as an important military supply conduit during World War II.

The Soviets expanded their ability to travel the NSR substantially when they launched a fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers, beginning with theLenin in 1957. The ships were expensive to build and operate, but they aided the Soviet Union in moving supplies throughout the nation's vast military-industrial complex in Siberia. During the Cold War, foreign ships were forbidden entrance to the NSR, which at its mid-1980s peak was carrying 6.6 million tons of cargo. Traffic fell precipitously, though, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Only in the past few years, with the rapid retreat of Arctic sea ice, has Russia made progress toward rebuilding the NSR for a new era of globalization. Russia's ambitions are aided by its fleet of 37 icebreakers, including the only four nuclear-powered icebreakers in the world, an inherited legacy of the Soviet era. Many of the ships are aging, but a new generation of larger nuclear vessels is under construction, ships designed to cut through thicker ice and extend the navigational season. In contrast, Canada has six and the United States has two.

A Rival to Suez?

Cargo volume for the 71 vessels that transited the NSR this year, 1.4 million tons, is small compared to that at the height of its service as a Soviet supply route, according to NSR Information Office of Rosatomflot and the nonprofit Centre for High North Logistics. But Russia's hopes for the new NSR are far more expansive. "The shortest route between Europe's largest markets and the Asia-Pacific region lie across the Arctic," Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said at an Arctic Forum in 2011. "I want to stress the importance of the Northern Sea Route as an international transport artery that will rival traditional trade lanes in service fees, security, and quality."

With this year's shipping milestones, the NSR may be on its way to fulfilling Putin's vision. The first commercial Chinese vessel and first container ship to transit the NSR, the Yong Sheng, commissioned by state-owned Cosco shipping, arrived in Rotterdam on September 10 laden with steel and industrial machinery. Its 33-day journey from the Chinese port of Dailan was nine days and 2,800 nautical miles shorter than the conventional voyage through the Suez Canal.

The Arctic Council's 2009 report estimated that the NSR offers from a 35 percent to 60 percent savings in distance for ships traveling between Europe and the Far East. Ships also can circumvent regional conflicts and the risk of piracy near the coast of Africa or in the Straits of Malacca off Malaysia.

Still, both expense and uncertainty are substantial. Hiring charges for mandatory escort by Rosatomflot's icebreakers vary, but the average cost is about $200,000, according to a report by Lloyd's of London.

Felix Tschudi, chairman of Tschudi Shipping, a company that focuses on cargo flows among Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, said in a recent article that the cost of escort through the NSR is roughly equivalent to that of passage through the Suez Canal. At a National Geographic forum this fall, The Arctic: The Science of Change, Tschudi challenged the notion that there was an "explosion" in Arctic shipping traffic. He and others note the NSR has a long way to go to catch up to the Suez, which provided passage for 17,225 ships and 928.5 million tons of cargo.

There are size constraints on ships in the shallow NSR. They need to wait for permission to transit. Even though sea ice has receded, andexperts now predict ice-free summers in the Arctic as soon as this decade, weather in the far north can be brutal and unpredictable. Poor visibility and the potential for wind-driven ice can cause unexpected delays, said Stephen Carmel, senior vice president of the giant Maersk shipping line, in a recent article for the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedingsmagazine. Because "container" shipping of goods (as opposed to bulk shipping of raw commodities like ores and fuel), relies heavily on on-time delivery, Carmel thinks it unlikely the NSR ever will become a major pathway for this kind of global commerce.

"It isn't just about the sea ice retreat, profound as it is," said Lawson Brigham, a former U.S. Coast Guard captain, now a professor at the  University of Alaska Fairbanks and chair of the Arctic Council's 2009 Arctic shipping assessment. "It's about whether you can make a Euro or a dollar."

Destination: Oil and Gas

Brigham, Carmel, and many other experts believe most Arctic ship traffic in the coming years will be "destination" shipping, with primary focus on the 22 percent of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and natural gas resources to be found in the far north. (See related story: "Russia Floats Plan for Nuclear Power Plants at Sea.")

For example, South Korea made its first NSR transit this year, commissioning the Swedish tanker Stena Polaris to transport naphtha, a crude oil derivative, from the Russian port of Ust-Luga near the Finland border. That's where the private Russian gas company Novatek, a fast-growing challenger to state-run Gazprom, opened a new gas processing complex in June.

Novatek's far bigger project is on the Yamal Peninsula along the NSR, a  major port at Sabetta and a $20 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant. Just last month, Novatek signed a deal to supply China National Petroleum Corporation for 15 years with fuel sent from Yamal by tanker. Production is expected to begin in 2016.

And Gazprom's new Prirazlomnaya platform, the world's first Arctic-class ice-resistant offshore oil rig, was set to begin drilling this year in the Pechora Sea, the southeast portion of the Barents Sea just outside Kara Strait. (See related: "Pictures: Four New Offshore Drilling Frontiers.") Greenpeace activists targeted the site for a protest against the energy development, its potential impact on the fragile Arctic environment, and contribution to global warming.

In August, the protesters' ship, the Arctic Sunrise, entered the NSR in defiance of Russian authorities, but then departed. The vessel was outside the NSR, in international waters, but within Russia's exclusive economic zone (within 200 nautical miles of shore), when boarded by members of Russia's Federal Security Service who dropped by helicopter on September 19. The incident demonstrated that Russia will act harshly against interference with its Arctic plans; the protesters and journalists were released only after the Netherlands filed an appeal at theInternational Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

Russia has sought to emphasize its efforts on safe offshore operations in the Arctic, adopting new insurance requirements making clear that ship owners are responsible for environmental damage and pollution. A new NSR administration was established earlier this year, and it is opening the first of ten planned search and rescue stations along the NSR, a project for which the government has set aside more than 900 million rubles—roughly $27 million. (See related photos: "Animal Winners and Losers in Arctic Oil Fields.")

Putin in September also announced the planned reopening of a Soviet-era military base on the Novosibirsk Islands to provide greater safety and security. He told a meeting of defense officials that reopening the base and its airfield will "make it possible for the emergency services, hydrologists, and climate specialists to work together to ensure the security and effective work of the Northern Sea Route." His announcement came after ten warships, led by the most powerful ship in the Russian Navy, the Petr Veliky, conducted maneuvers in the NSR,reportedly encountering no ice whatsoever in a monthlong journey that ended September 20.

The Nordvik was not so fortunate. The nearly 30-year-old tanker was carrying almost 5,000 tons of diesel fuel when it began taking on water after it rammed an ice floe September 4 in a strait east of the Kara Sea. Russian authorities said the tanker acted in violation of its NSR permit by entering waters with medium ice conditions without icebreaker escort. In a drama that played out over two weeks, the cargo was unloaded onto another tanker, and two Rosatomflot nuclear icebreakers escorted the vessel back to its home port. (See related, "As Arctic Melts, a Race to Test Oil Spill Cleanup Technology.")

The incident demonstrated that maintaining safety on the NSR will require not only rules but enforcement and emergency response. A main finding of the Arctic Council's 2009 marine shipping report was the lack of infrastructure for both saving lives and pollution mitigation. (See related: "Ice-Breaking: U.S. Oil Drilling Starts as Nations Mull Changed Arctic.") There are limits to radio and satellite communications, and large gaps in navigational charts and meteorological data, making emergency response extremely difficult. (See related: "In Kulluk's Wake, Deeper Debate Roils on Arctic Drilling.")

Climate change may have opened access to the Arctic waters, but the environment continues to be harsh, said Brigham. "People think just because the ice is going away, we're just going to drive across the Arctic. It actually may be more complicated because the ice is dynamic," Brigham said. "Ice is a complicated barrier, even if it's not a complete barrier."

Joel K. Bourne Jr. also contributed to this report.

Sand and Fracking

We've been talking about the economic uses of certain sediment types.  The article below appeared in today's Wall Street Journal.

In Fracking, Sand Is the New Gold
Energy Boom Fuels Demand for Key Ingredient Used in Drilling Wells; 100 Sand Mines in Wisconsin
By
ALISON SIDER and
KRISTIN JONES CONNECT
Dec. 2, 2013 7:49 p.m. ET

The race to drill for oil in the U.S. is creating another boom—in sand, a key ingredient in fracking.

Sand for Fracking Causes Safety Dust-Up
View Slideshow

A conveyor at a Pattison Sand Co. mining operation in Iowa. Stephen Mally for The Wall Street Journal
More photos and interactive graphics

Energy companies are expected to use 56.3 billion pounds of sand this year, blasting it down oil and natural gas wells to help crack rocks and allow fuel to flow out. Sand use has increased 25% since 2011, according to the consulting firm PacWest, which expects a further 20% rise over the next two years.

In Wisconsin, the source of white sand perfectly suited for hydraulic fracturing, state officials now estimate more than 100 sand mines, loading, and processing facilities have received permits, up from just five sand mines and five processing plants operating in 2010.

And the stocks of publicly traded companies that deal in sand have soared. Shares of Houston-based Hi-Crush Partners HCLP +3.90% LP have jumped 59% since it began trading in August 2012. Shares of U.S. Silica Holdings Inc., SLCA -0.99% based in Frederick, Md., have doubled since it went public in 2012, giving it a stock market value of $1.9 billion.

Less than a decade ago, U.S. Silica focused on sand for industrial and consumer products—plate glass for windows and, more recently, glass for iPhone and iPad screens. Now those uses account for just half the sand the company digs out of its open pits and even less of revenue.

Related
Sand Miner Under Scrutiny

During the first nine months of this year, the more than $245 million in sand sold to energy companies accounted for 62% of U.S. Silica's sales, up from 53% during the same period in 2012 and 33% during the first nine months of 2011.

Hydraulic fracturing is the process of pumping a mixture of sand, chemicals and water down a well at high pressure to break up dense rock formations so that oil and gas can flow to the surface. The sand left behind in the fracking process props open those tiny pathways so trapped fossil fuels can escape.

Railroad operators are carrying boxcars filled with sand to shale fields including the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico, the Bakken formation of North Dakota and the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania.

While some of these places might seem to have plenty of sand of their own available, many fracking outfits prefer Wisconsin white sand, which is bigger and has rounder grains better suited for holding open larger pathways.

Union Pacific Railroad shipped 94,000 railcars of frack sand in the first half of the year—a 20% increase over the same period of 2012.

Canadian National Railway Co. is spending $68 million over three years to upgrade and restore more than 100 miles of track in Wisconsin so it can boost sand shipments out of state.

U.S. Silica and BNSF Railroad are building a sand distribution hub south of San Antonio, at the edge of the oil-rich Eagle Ford shale. U.S. Silica will ship more than 1 billion pounds of sand each year there from Ottawa, Ill., 85 miles southwest of Chicago, and Sparta, Wis., about 250 miles to the north.

"It takes 25 railcars of sand, on average, to frack one well," said Bryan Shinn, U.S. Silica's chief executive.

Companies are starting to experiment with using even more sand. Pumping 8 million pounds of sand into a well instead of the more typical 4 million pounds could add around $600,000 to the cost of an oil well, but in some cases can double its output, said Wells Fargo analyst Matt Conlan.

Demand for sand was so high last year that prices hit an average $75 per metric ton. The new mining boom in Wisconsin has helped push those prices back to about $50 at the mine, according to PacWest.

Oil-service companies that fracture wells mark up the sand and add transportation costs to the final bill, which can triple the price of sand paid by operators.

That has shale-oil producers like EOG Resources Inc. getting deeper into sand as a way to keep its costs per well in check. At the end of 2011, the company opened a plant in Chippewa Falls, Wis., about 100 miles east of Minneapolis, Minn., to process sand from mines it operates.

Prepping sand to be used in fracking involves sifting it for the right-sized crystals, separating out contaminates, washing it and drying it.

But the sand boom is creating worries about worker safety as well as local opposition over the clouds of airborne dust from heavy-duty trucks hauling the sand from mines to processing plants and rail depots. Pattison Sand Co. in Clayton, Iowa, has faced particular scrutiny.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls the fine granules unleashed from sand mining respirable crystalline silica—or silica dust—and says it is linked to silicosis and lung cancer.

"There's a tendency to say it's just dust and people have always been exposed to dust," said David Kriebel, an epidemiologist at the University of Massachusetts. "Crystalline silica is an extremely hazardous substance. Every little piece of crystalline silica that reaches the lungs causes scarring."

In Trempealeau County, Wis., where a number of new sand mines have opened, officials recently imposed a one-year ban on issuing new permits.

"We were looking at hundreds of permits being taken out, dozens of proposed mines that could become operational within a year," said Sally Miller, a member of the county's board of supervisors. "I didn't want us to be 20 years from now saying we wish we had known."

Even so, some state lawmakers worry a much needed job-creating sector is under threat, and hope to shift regulatory control to the state.

"We've always paid out to the oil producing states," said Sen. Tom Tiffany, a Republican. "To have the oil producing states pay us for our natural resources is really a good thing."