Those Deadly Fumes From French Seaweed? Hydrogen Sulphide @ Up To Lethal Levels Of 1,000 PPM - AFP

Mounds of rotting seaweed clogging beaches across northwestern France are emitting a toxic and potentially lethal gas, test results released by the government showed on Thursday.

Tests were ordered on the foul-smelling algae, which green groups blame on nitrates fertilisers used by local farmers, after a horse apparently died from inhaling fumes on a beach in Saint Michel de Greve in Brittany.

Results showed the seaweed in Saint Michel was giving off dangerous levels of hydrogen sulphide (H2S), sometimes referred to as "sewer gas" because it is produced by the breakdown of putrified waste material. "Measurements carried out on site ... showed in several places that the gas released by sediment containing the decomposing algae could be dangerous," said France's national institute for environmental threats, INERIS.

Several points on the beach tested positive for hydrogen sulphide at a concentration of 1,000 parts per million, a level that "can be deadly in a few minutes," the report said. INERIS recommended the area be cordoned off as a short-term precautionary measure, and for workers charged with clearing the algae be equipped with hydrogen sulphide detectors.

EDIT

http://www.terradaily.com/2007/090820120953.i3l95shn.html

The problem now is the shear volume.
We are doing what we can we have an organic veggie garden. We limit pesticides, weed killer etc..When you have poison ivy allergy and a grand prize poison ivy crop. We spray individual plants, not areas.
Mostly we use volk oil and neem oil, the work in different ways, volk kills bugs all of them. Too many some times. Neem oil is very very bitter to bugs and it also disrupts the larval stage of insects that will kill your plant, they never mature never lay eggs..
Another way is to plant 4 0'clock flowers near your prized plants, they draw Japanese beetles and jun bugs the brown ones, the flowers are irresistible the beetles eat and die. No poison no run off, and the flowers are attractive and smell good in the evening.
We are also planning gray water reuse and rain catchment since our rains lately come all at once.

In the end-Permian, as the levels of atmospheric oxygen fell and the levels of hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide rose, the upper levels of the oceans could have become rich in hydrogen sulfide catastrophically. This would kill most the oceanic plants and animals. The hydrogen sulfide dispersing in the atmosphere would kill most terrestrial life.
"A hydrogen sulfide atmosphere fits the extinction better than one enriched in carbon dioxide," says Kump. "Carbon dioxide would have a profound effect on marine life, but terrestrial plants thrive on carbon dioxide, yet they are included in the extinction."
Another piece in the puzzle surrounding this extinction is that hydrogen sulfide gas destroys the ozone layer. Recently, Dr. Henk Visscher of Utrecht University and his colleagues suggested that there are fossil spores from the end-Permian that show deformities that researchers suspect were caused by ultra violet light.
"These deformities fit the idea that the ozone layer was damaged, letting in more ultra violet," says Kump.
Once this process is underway, methane produced in the ample swamps of this time period has little in the atmosphere to destroy it. The atmosphere becomes one of hydrogen sulfide, methane and ultra violet radiation.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050223130549.htm

we will suffocate in our own shit.