DDT
How a shocking environmental disaster was uncovered after 70 years
Jeff Berardelli 

CBS NEWS

4/12/2021

Just 10 miles off the coast of Los Angeles lurks an environmental disaster over 70 years in the making, which few have ever heard about. That is, until now, thanks to the research of a University of California marine scientist named David Valentine.

© Dr. David Valentine barrel-valentine.jpg

Working with little more than rumors and a hunch, curiosity guided him 3,000 feet below the ocean's surface. A few hours of research time and an autonomous robotic submersible unearthed what had been hidden since the 1940s: countless barrels of toxic waste, laced with DDT, littering the ocean floor in between Long Beach and Catalina Island.

© Provided by CBS News / Credit: Dr. David Valentine

The fact that his underwater camera spotted dozens of decaying barrels immediately in what is otherwise a barren, desert-like sea floor, Valentine says, is evidence that the number of barrels is likely immense. Although the exact number is still unknown, a historical account estimates it may be as many as a half a million.

After 70-plus years of inaction, Valentine's research has finally helped initiate a huge research effort to reveal the extent of the contamination.

But this offshore dump site is only a part of the story of environmental damage from years of DDT discharge along the coast of Southern California — a story which likely won't be closed for decades to come because of its ongoing impact, including a recently discovered alarming and unprecedented rate of cancer in the state's sea lion population, with 1 in every 4 adult sea lions plagued with the disease.

The history of DDT dumping

The chemical DDT was invented in 1939 and used during World War II as a pesticide helping to protect troops from insect-borne diseases like Malaria. After the war, production of the chemical ramped up and it became routinely used in the spraying of crops, and even over crowded beaches, to eliminate pests like mosquitos.

© Provided by CBS News / Credit: CBS News

But in the 1960s, DDT was discovered to be toxic. Over time, eating food laced with DDT builds up inside the tissues of animals and even humans, resulting in harmful side effects. The EPA now calls it a "probable human carcinogen." In 1972, when the U.S. government started taking environmental pollution seriously with legislation like the Clean Air Act, DDT was banned in the United States.

The largest DDT manufacturer in the U.S., Montrose Chemical Corporation, was located along the Southern California coast in the city of Torrance. From 1947 through 1982, Montrose manufactured and distributed DDT worldwide. In doing so, a byproduct mix of toxic sludge made up of petrochemicals, DDT and PCBs was produced.

For decades, that hazardous waste was disposed of in two ways. Some of the toxic pollution was dumped into storm drains and the sewer system, which was then pumped out to sea through outflow pipes, 2 miles offshore of the city of Rancho Palos Verdes.

The rest of the waste was disposed of in barrels which were loaded onto barges and floated 10 to 15 miles offshore to waste dumping sites off Catalina Island and then jettisoned into the ocean.

© Provided by CBS News / Credit: CBS News

While it may seem hard to believe, at least part of the dumping was legally permitted. Back then, Valentine says, the prevailing thought was the ocean's were so huge that they could never be compromised. The mantra was "dilution is the solution to pollution" — in hindsight a naïve notion.

But while the designated dumping site was very deep — in 3,000 feet of water — Valentine says shortcuts were taken, with barrels being dumped much closer to shore. And, in an effort to get the barrels to sink, there is evidence that many were slashed, allowing poison to leak, as they were dropped into the ocean.

For decades, the existence of these toxic barrels was surmised only by a very small group of scientists and regulators. That's despite a startling report produced in the 1980s by a California Regional Water Quality Control Board scientist named Allan Chartrand, which asserted there may be as many as 500,000 barrels laced with DDT sitting on the ocean floor.

The report was largely ignored. But after nearly 30 years, Valentine dusted it off as he began his quest to see if these barrels existed.

The inshore toxic waste site

Unlike the deep water dumping sites, the shallower toxic site — called the Palos Verdes Shelf — 2 miles off the beaches of Rancho Palos Verdes was well-known and documented. In 1996, this zone was declared a Superfund clean-up site by the EPA, now comprising a 34-square-mile area. Montrose was sued and after a protracted legal battle ending in late 2000 the companies involved, including Montrose, settled for $140 million.

© Provided by CBS News / Credit: CBS News

Over the past two decades, most of the money has been used by a program called the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program (MSRP) to try to restore the contaminated sites. Half of the funds were allocated to the EPA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to rehabilitate ecosystems impacted by the poison.

DDT gets into the food chain when it is consumed from the contaminated ocean bottom by tiny marine creatures, which are then eaten by small fish, which are then consumed by larger fish and marine mammals, like sea lions. Over time DDT builds up in the tissues and blubber of marine animals, a process called bioaccumulation. To this day, signs all along the Southern California coast warn fishermen not to eat certain fish. Despite this, you cannot get DDT contamination from swimming in the water.

Scientists say the contamination at this shallower water site is the most likely food chain route which leads to DDT building up in sea lion blubber. That's because there is a much greater amount of marine life living in shallower water. But that does not rule out contamination from the much deeper site as well.

To try to remedy these pollution problems, NOAA has used its share of the funds to manage almost 20 restoration projects off the LA coast, like restoring kelp forest habitat, helping migratory seabirds and restoring 500 acres of critical coastal marsh habitat in Huntington Beach.

The last project of the effort — just completed — was the commissioning of an artificial reef just off the beaches of Rancho Palos Verdes. To accomplish this, NOAA hired a team of scientists from the Southern California Marine Science Institute and Vantuna Research Group at Occidental College to design and deploy the reef.

The reef building effort was led by Jonathan Williams, a marine biologist from Occidental College. The project involved strategically placing more than 70,000 tons of quarry rock on the ocean bottom just off the beach. Williams says that the reef was an immediate success, with thousands of fish flocking to the rocks.

© Provided by CBS News / Credit: NOAA Fisheries

This reef site is much closer to shore than the contamination site, which is 2 miles from land. That's by design. Williams says the idea is to construct new habitat for fish and kelp in uncontaminated areas to build up healthy populations of fish. This helps limit the amount of toxins, like DDT, which enters the food chain.

As predators at the top of the food chain, DDT in fish is also a danger to people. Williams says this is especially true of underserved communities who are mostly likely to subsistence fish, eating what they catch. In this way, NOAA's project addresses environmental justice by attempting to make fish more safe to eat.

Two miles offshore, Williams says that after years of measuring high levels of DDT on the Palos Verdes Shelf, levels have started to drop precipitously, a sign that some of the DDT may finally be starting to break down.
Discovering the barrels

Despite the fact that the toxic barrels were dumped in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, their existence just became common knowledge this past fall when the Los Angeles Times published a feature on Valentine's work. But his discovery dates all the way back to 2011 when he first decided to see if the rumors of the barrels were true. In 2013 he made another short trip to the site. But his research was not published until March of 2019.

In all, his time-limited work yielded visuals of 60 barrels. Besides bringing back video of the leaking barrels, his team was also able to collect samples from the ocean floor. One of them registered a contamination 40 times greater than the highest contamination at the Superfund site, indicating that the toxins down deep are still very concentrated.

Armed with this compelling evidence, Valentine said that he "beat the drum" for years, speaking to various government agencies, trying to get some interest, but to no avail. However, when the LA Times story came out, interest finally followed as public outcry grew.

But before his discovery in 2011, Valentine placed part of the blame for the lack of knowledge about the barrels on the lack of technology to find it. It's only in the past couple of decades that the technology became available to make this deep water research feasible.

Coincidentally, on the very day CBS News went to visit Valentine in Southern California, Scripps Institution of Oceanography began a two-week mission to survey almost 50,000 feet of the deep ocean seafloor.

© Provided by CBS News / Credit: Scripps

Employing a large research vessel called the Sally Ride, 31 scientists and crew members, and two high-tech autonomous robots they call Roombas, the team used sophisticated sonar to map the ocean bottom and assess how many barrels there are.

© Provided by CBS News Scripps Researchers aboard the Research Vessel Sally Ride using the REMUS 600 and Bluefin automated underwater vehicles (AUVs) to survey the seafloor for discarded DDT barrels in March 2021. / Credit: Scripps

As of our last conversation with Eric Terrill, the team leader, the final number had still not been tallied. But even as early as a week into the research mission, Terrill described detecting tens of thousands of targets and said the number of barrels seemed "overwhelming."

The two-week mission is now complete, but the team is still putting together the pieces. They expect to have a final report published at the end of April.

Sea lions in trouble

Located right near the Golden Gate Bridge, the mission of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California is to rescue marine mammals in distress. Since 1975, the organization says they have rescued 24,000.

In December, the team published a 30-year study on sea lions, finding an alarming statistic: 25% of adult sea lions have cancer.

CBS News interviewed the lead veterinarian Dr. Cara Field. She called the number of sea lions with cancer both "extremely alarming" and "unprecedented in wildlife." Last year the Marine Mammal Center had to euthanize 29 sea lions because of cancer.

© Provided by CBS News / Credit: NOAA Fisheries

In the report, the research team pointed to a combination of herpesvirus and contaminants like DDT and PCBs as the cause of cancer. In all cases of cancer, sea lions had elevated levels of DDT and PCBs in their blubber. The theory goes that the contaminants weaken the body's immune system, making the virus more effective.

Because sea lions travel up and down the California coast yearly, scientists believe they may pick up the contaminants when they are near their breeding site on the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California.

And while it seems logical that the sea lion contamination is coming from polluted sites in shallow water, scientists do not yet know how much of the DDT from barrels in deeper water may be entering the food chain. This, they say, will require more research.

While there are still many unanswered questions, one lesson from this story of DDT contamination is clear: When humans callously pollute the environment it can have consequences for generations to come. One current example is human-caused climate change. The question is, how much of a burden will our children and grandchildren have to bear as reult of our choices?

Once-rare Arctic lightning is now more frequent—and may reshape the region

Lightning in the Arctic used to be so vanishingly rare that people could go their whole lives without seeing a flash. But as the region warms rapidly, it may become more common—with effects that could reach outside the Arctic.

  

© Photograph by Prisma by Dukas Presseagentur GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo

 Lightning flashes during a storm, Yukon, August.

One recent study projects that the occurrence of lightning in the Arctic could double by the end of the century. Another study suggests that the number of Arctic flashes may have tripled within the last decade alone—though some researchers question that result.

Increased lightning is a worrying sign of today’s rapidly accelerating climate change, scientists say, but they’re also concerned for the future: More lightning could set off a cascade of ecological shifts that could release huge Arctic reserves of carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating warming further.

“The previous numbers [of lightning flashes] have been small, but it could have a really big climate impact,” says Yang Chen, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, and the lead author of one of the new studies, published in Nature Climate Change.
Lightning-lit fires are increasing

In 2002, when researchers interviewed Indigenous elders from an Arctic community in northwest Canada, none could remember seeing more than a few lightning storms in their lifetimes. One elder recalled having seen a single storm in the 1930s, when she was only five years old.

Scientists weren’t really thinking about Arctic lightning back then either: It was so rare that even researchers who had spent decades of summers in the region might have never seen a flash.

“When I first came to Fairbanks, I’d see a thunderstorm and I’d be surprised,” says Uma Bhatt, a meteorologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks who has studied lightning’s rise in the Arctic and has lived in the state for 22 years.

In 2014 and 2015, some of the largest fires ever recorded burned across vast swaths of Alaska and Canada’s Northwest Territories. Like over 90 percent of all fires in the Arctic, these were sparked by lightning strikes.

As the Arctic warms and dries, plants there are becoming more flammable. But after 2014 and 2015, Sander Veravebeke, a climate scientist at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universitat and a co-author of one of the recent papers, wondered if there was another piece of the story: Were the lightning flashes that start fires also becoming more common?

“I checked the lightning data for those years and saw, ok, this isn’t a coincidence,” says Veravebeke, “An increase in lightning almost immediately leads to increase in fire.”

In a 2017 paper, he and colleagues found that the number of lightning-started fires in Alaska and the Northwest Territories had more than doubled since 1975, culminating in record-breaking numbers of ignitions in both places during the devastating 2014 and 2015 seasons.
Is there more lightning?

But was lightning actually flashing more often across the whole Arctic? That turns out to be a tricky question to answer, because no consistent, continually measured Arctic-wide records of the phenomenon exist.

A satellite launched in 1995 recorded polar lightning flashes, but it retired in 2000. Newer lightning-sensing satellites see only as far north and south as the mid-latitudes, not all the way to the poles.

Ground-based networks, which use sensors that detect the radio waves produced by lightning bolts, now record flashes that happen nearly everywhere in the world. Bhatt, using a regional network in Alaska, found a 17 percent increase in lightning activity between 1986 and 2015.

But Arctic-wide records are short, extending back less than 20 years, and are still not conclusive enough to document a solid trend, climate scientists say.

Recently, a team at the University of Washington dug into data from the World Wide Lightning Location Network, a land-based network of sensors that has been operational since 2004. They found that the number of flashes recorded north of 65 degrees increased from under 50,000 in 2010 to roughly 250,000 in 2020. Some of that might be attributable to an increase in the number of sensors, the researchers say, but estimate that lightning in the region has grown by a factor of three over the last decade.

Another global lightning-detection network run by the company Vaisala, however, does not capture this dramatic increase. The Global Lightning Database 360 became operational in 2012, so their record is shorter than the Washington team’s, but the network is more sensitive, recording more and fainter flashes than the others.

But from 2012 to 2020, they didn’t record any clear increase in lightning activity, says Ryan Said, a research engineer at Vaisala. That doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t a trend, he says—just that it will take more years of observation to really figure out how the patterns are changing.

“This is really just the beginning of that journey,” he says.

The Vaisala lightning network has detected some unusual activity in recent years. In the summers of 2019 and 2020 the GLD360 recorded well over 100 flashes north of 85 degrees—including a spate of ultra-rare lightning within 300 nautical miles of the North Pole.
More lightning is probably coming

Whether or not the shifts are already happening, climate change means that more lightning is almost certainly coming to the Arctic, says Chen.

Lightning formation requires some very specific ingredients that have been rare in the far North, but that climate change may be making more common.

First, air at the surface has to be warm and loaded with moisture, ready to buoy rapidly. The air above it must be cold enough that when the warm air shoots upward, its moisture freezes into tiny ice particles. The whole system has to be so turbulent that the air swirls and roils, flinging around the ice particles with such vigor that they knock electrons from each other and become electrically charged. And then, finally, the giant discharge will occur, either within the cloud itself or between the cloud and the ground.

The Arctic’s cold, relatively stable atmosphere has not historically proved hospitable for thunderstorms. But air temperatures in the region have risen one to two degrees Celsius in the past three decades alone, faster than anywhere else on the planet.

Chen and his colleagues, including Veravebeke, wanted to estimate how much more lightning those changed climate conditions could induce by the end of the century. They compared the lightning data from the satellite that had recorded Arctic flashes in the 1990s with weather data from the same time period to figure out what atmospheric conditions matched up best with the rare occurrences of lightning in the region.

Climate models projected those specific lightning-conducive conditions, and by extension lightning—which is slightly different from the overall likelihood of thunderstorms—were likely to happen about one and a half times as often over the tundra in the future and nearly double over the northern forests. That’s a much bigger relative change than the 50 percent increase projected for the continental U.S. Globally, some research suggests there could be actually be a decrease in total lightning activity by 2100, in part because the lightning-rich tropics may warm so much that ice crystals form less often.

It’s not possible to match up the satellite data Chen and his colleagues used to estimate lightning with the ground-based networks used to detect the recent rise in activity, so the two results can’t be directly compared or integrated. But they both underscore that “Arctic lightning is becoming more important,” says Veravebeke.


The lightning feedback loop

But the biggest concern isn’t the lightning itself; it’s what the lightning might do. Wildfires anywhere in the world can release the carbon stored in forests and soils. The 2020 Australian wildfires, for example, emitted over 800 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, nearly one and a half times the country’s annual total.

Fires don’t just burn woody stuff aboveground. “Burning is three dimensional,” explains Michelle Mack, an ecologist and Arctic expert at Northern Arizona University. It combusts organic matter in the soil below the surface flames—and the soil in the Arctic is much more carbon-rich than in other parts of the world. It often holds decades of accumulated carbon just in the upper few inches. Arctic fires scouring away those surface soils can release at least twice as much carbon as their Californian counterparts, Veravebeke says.

The research suggests that by the end of the century, just because of more lightning starting more fires, the area burned and carbon emitted from the Arctic could increase by over 150 percent over today’s average annual fire-related emissions of about 3.4 million metric tons of carbon.

But it could get worse. Fires change the ecosystem, facilitating the northward march of forests and shrubs by opening up new areas for them to grow. That in turn increases the chance of fires, because woody stuff catches fire more readily than tundra.

Forests are also warmer and thus more fire-prone than tundra, because they are darker and thus absorb more sunlight. If lightning-induced fires increase and speed up the northward spread of forests, Chen and his colleagues found, the carbon emissions could increase by 570 percent over today’s, adding about 23 million metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year—about a fifth as much 2020’s catastrophic in California.

The team outlined but didn’t do the math on the scarier carbon concern: that lightning-instigated fires could also expose the carbon-rich permafrost that underlies five million square miles of the Arctic, accelerating the rate at which it’s thawing and releasing its immense stores of trapped carbon. In other words, that 570 percent increase in carbon emissions? “That’s the low end of the estimates,” Chen says.

New species of frog unearthed in Peruvian Amazon jungle
AFP 

4/12/2021

A new species of marsupial frog has been discovered in Peru's Amazon jungle, the state service for natural protected areas said on Monday.

© Handout An image provided by Peru's state service for the protection of natural areas of a new species of frog found in Peru's Amazon jungle

The new species belongs to the Gastrotheca genus of tailless frogs found in South and Central America.

"The Cordillera de Colan National Sanctuary made an important discovery for science: a new species of marsupial frog registered for the first time in this protected area in the Amazon region," said the SERNANP service.

The discovery was made a few weeks ago during a study in the humid tundra and mountainous woodland area of the Cordilleras de Colan, an Amazon region in the north of Peru close to the Ecuador border that sits at 3,100 meters altitude.

© Handout The new species of marsupial frog has thick granular skin and no markings on its belly

"This new species is distinguished by having a thick granular skin on the back, a green dorsal coloration without a pattern, turquoise iris and a belly without spots, specks or dots," said SERNANP.

The Cordillera de Colan National Sanctuary spans more than 39,000 hectares and includes six areas of threatened wildlife.

Peruvian authorities say the area is of great biological importance as several unique species live there.

It has thus been classified as a priority site for conservation.

cm/ljc/dga/bc/st

UPDATED

'Huge' explosion rocks St. Vincent as volcano keeps erupting

KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent — La Soufriere volcano fired an enormous amount of ash and hot gas early Monday in the biggest explosive eruption yet since volcanic activity began on the eastern Caribbean island of St. Vincent late last week, with officials worried about the lives of those who have refused to evacuate.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Experts called it a “huge explosion” that generated pyroclastic flows down the volcano’s south and southwest flanks.

“It’s destroying everything in its path,” Erouscilla Joseph, director of the University of the West Indies’ Seismic Research Center, told The Associated Press. “Anybody who would have not heeded the evacuation, they need to get out immediately.”

There were no immediate reports of injuries or death, but government officials were scrambling to respond to the latest eruption, which was even bigger than the first eruption that occurred Friday morning. Roughly 16,000 people who live in communities close to the volcano had been evacuated under government orders on Thursday, but an unknown number have remained behind and refused to move.

Richard Robertson, with the seismic research centre, told local station NBC Radio that the volcano's old and new dome have been destroyed and that a new crater has been created. He said that the pyroclastic flows would have razed everything in their way.

“Anything that was there, man, animal, anything...they are gone,” he said. “And it’s a terrible thing to say it.”

Joseph said the latest explosion is equivalent to the one that occurred in 1902 and killed some 1,600. The volcano last erupted in 1979. Ash from the ongoing explosions has fallen on Barbados and other nearby islands.

One government minister who toured the island’s northeast region on Sunday said he saw an estimated two or three dozen people still remaining in the community of Sandy Bay alone, prompting Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves to urge people to leave.

“It is over time for you to leave,” he said. “It is dangerous.”

The ongoing volcanic activity has threatened water and food supplies, with the government forced to drill for fresh water and distribute it via trucks.

“We cannot put tarpaulin over a river,” said Garth Saunders, minister of the island’s water and sewer authority, referring to the impossibility of trying to protect current water sources from ongoing falling ash.

He told NBC Radio that officials also are trying to set up water distribution points.

Meanwhile, Gonsalves said government officials are meeting Monday afternoon to talk about difficulties with food supplies.

Deputy Prime Minister Montgomery Daniel told the radio station that the damage was extensive in the island’s northeast region, which he toured on Sunday. Forests and farms were wiped out, with coconut, breadfruit, mango and soursop trees destroyed, as well as plantain and banana crops.

“What I saw was indeed terrible,” he said.

Cots, tents, water tanks and other basic supplies were flooding into St. Vincent as nearby nations rushed to help those affected by the eruptions. At least four empty cruise ships floated nearby, waiting to take evacuees to other islands who have agreed to temporarily receive them, including Antigua and Grenada. Gonsalves, however, said he expects his administration might call off the cruise ships since the vast majority of people seem to be staying in St. Vincent for now.

The only people evacuated from St. Vincent via cruise ship are 136 farm workers who are part of a seasonal agricultural program and had been stranded on the island. The group was supposed to fly to Canada, but their flight was cancelled as a result of Friday's explosion. They arrived Saturday in St. Lucia and will board a flight to Canada from there.

Gonsalves told NBC Radio on Sunday that his government will do everything possible to help those forced to abandon their homes in ash-filled communities.

“It’s a huge operation that is facing us,” he said. “It’s going to be costly, but I don’t want us to penny pinch...this is going to be a long haul.”

Gonsalves said it could take four months for life to go back to normal in St. Vincent, part of an island chain of that includes the Grenadines. The majority of the 100,000 inhabitants live in St. Vincent.

Among them is Ranique Chewitt, a 32-year-old salesman who lives in South Rivers, located southeast of the volcano.

He hasn't had to evacuate, but said he is worried about his health and water supply and hasn't left home since the first eruption on Friday morning: “I do get shortness of breath from dust, and I am inside.”

The pandemic also is complicating response efforts. At least 14 new cases of COVID-19 have been reported since the eruptions began on Friday, and all those going to shelters are being tested. Those who test positive are taken to isolation centres. More than 3,700 people are in 84 government shelters.

The eastern Caribbean has 19 live volcanoes, 17 of those located on 11 islands. The remaining two are located underwater near Grenada, including one called Kick ’Em Jenny that has been active in recent years. The most active volcano of all is Soufriere Hills in Montserrat, which has erupted continuously since 1995, destroying the capital of Plymouth and killing at least 19 people in 1997.

___

Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico

Kristin Deane And DáNica Coto, The Associated Press

Power outages hit Saint Vincent island amid explosive volcano tremors

Sunday, April 11th 2021, 1:58 pm - On Sunday morning, Saint Vincent's National Emergency Management Organisation (NEMO) said there was a huge power outage after "another explosive event" at the volcano. However, by 12 p.m. ET (1600 GMT), power had been restored, residents said.

By  Robertson S. Henry

Reuters

KINGSTOWN, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (Reuters) - The Caribbean Saint Vincent island was hit by another explosive event from the La Soufriere volcano early on Sunday, triggering power cuts and water outages in some areas, while ash clouds began to blanket parts of the island of Barbados.

After decades of inactivity, the volcano erupted on Friday, spewing dark clouds of ash some 10 km (6 miles) into the air and prompting an evacuation of thousands of people on the island. The volcano has continued to rumble and vent ash since then.

 

FILE PHOTO: Ash covers palm trees and a church a day after the La Soufriere volcano erupted after decades of inactivity, about 5 miles (8 km) away in Georgetown, St Vincent and the Grenadines April 10, 2021 in a still image from video. REUTERS/Robertson S. Henry/File Photo

On Sunday morning, Saint Vincent's National Emergency Management Organisation (NEMO) said there was a huge power outage after "another explosive event" at the volcano. However, by 12 p.m. ET (1600 GMT), power had been restored, residents said.

"Explosions and accompanying ashfall, of similar or larger magnitude, are likely to continue to occur over the next few days," the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Centre said on Twitter.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which has a population of just over 100,000, has not experienced volcanic activity since 1979, when an eruption created approximately $100 million in damages. An eruption by La Soufriere in 1902 killed more than 1,000 people.

 The name means "sulfur outlet" in French.

Finance Minister Camillo Gonsalves said the government believes about 20,000 people will be internally displaced for about three to four months.

"Historically, the volcano keeps going intermittently for a couple months," he said. "Most crops on island will be lost, and untold livestock."

FILE PHOTO: Ash and smoke billow as the La Soufriere volcano erupts in Kingstown on the eastern Caribbean island of St. Vincent April 9, 2021. REUTERS/Robertson S. Henry/File Photo

Some houses in the island have also collapsed due to the weight of the ash, Gonsalves added.

In the tourist island of Barbados, about 178 km (110 miles) from Saint Vincent, the meteorological services agency said varying intensities of ash were impacting the island. Videos posted on social media showing a thin layer of ash coating cars and even the country's airport, which remains closed.

(Reporting by Robertson S. Henry; Writing by Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

What the St. Vincent volcano's eruption could mean for the atmosphere

Embedded content: https://players.brightcove.net/1942203455001/B1CSR9sVf_default/index.html?videoId=6248409115001

After blasting to life after decades of dormancy on Friday, the La Soufriere volcano on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent has continued to vent ash into the air, along with regular volcanic rumblings.

So far no deaths have been reported, but the volcano is expected to cause significant hardship, with thousands expected to be displaced for several weeks amid severe impact to crops and livestock.

The volcano was so powerful that the shockwave was actually visible from space, and ash from the eruption soon reached Barbados, some 200 km to the east.

Aside from the impact on people, there may be a climate effect as well, as Tyler Hamilton, a meteorologist at The Weather Network, explains in the video above.

It's all to do with sulfur dioxide, one output from the volcano (in fact, the volcano's name, 'La Soufriere,' is a reference to sulfur). Depending on how long the eruption goes on, and how much sulfur dioxide is emitted, and whether the ash cloud reaches the stratosphere, it may actually induce a global cooling effect for a period.

Watch the video above for a full explanation.

Volcanoes Could Be To Blame For Respiratory Illnesses Even if You Live Hundreds of Miles Away

Duration: 01:19 

They may be beautiful, but they could be more destructive to respiratory health than previously thought.

Amaze Lab

SEE

St. Vincent covered in ash as volcano activity continues

Volcanic eruption rocks Caribbean island of St. Vincent

TODAY IN HISTORY SIXTY YEARS AGO

Yuri Gagarin: The first man in space

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was having a rough time of it in April 1961

By Gregory McNamee, CNN 

4/12/2021

© Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Getty Images Cosmonaut yuri gagarin during last minute checks of vostok i control systems before launch, 1961. (Photo by: Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

In office for less than three months, Kennedy was facing down what he and his advisers suspected to be an untrustworthy Central Intelligence Agency.

He would confirm his suspicion toward the end of the month, when Cuban rebels bankrolled by the agency invaded their Communist-held homeland. At a meeting with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and others on April 12, Kennedy had stressed he wanted the invasion to be a Cuban operation as much as possible, and the CIA assured him that the rebels were up to the job.

The result, a week later, was the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a military and political disaster that would only embolden Fidel Castro and his chief benefactor, the Soviet Union.

Kennedy blamed the Soviets for his bad April. In his inaugural address in January, he made an overture to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, inviting the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to join the United States in "exploring the stars."

Khrushchev's answer came 60 years ago, on April 12, 1961, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth aboard a spacecraft called Vostok 1. After parachuting from the craft near the Russian village of Smelovka, Gagarin landed a hero — and a major embarrassment for the United States, already stung by the Soviet first-in-the-race launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite four years earlier.

READ MORE: Famous firsts in space

The Vostok rocket was the brainchild of Soviet engineer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. Embarrassed in turn by their failure to develop an atomic bomb before the Americans did, the Soviet leadership had poured a huge portion of the country's budget into scientific research, building a testing ground and rocket base in Kazakhstan that, wrote Stephen Walker in his new book "Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space," was four times the size of Greater London. There, Korolev worked his magic, building a series of rockets over several years.

The CIA reported, accurately, to President Dwight Eisenhower that thanks to Korolev's powerful fleet of intercontinental missiles, the Soviets would be ready to put a satellite into space by 1958.

The Soviets were ahead of schedule by three months. And with Sputnik, as Tom Wolfe wrote in his frenetic classic of the space race, "The Right Stuff," "a colossal panic was underway, with congressmen and newspapermen leading a huge pack that was baying at the sky where the hundred-pound Soviet satellite kept beeping around the world. ... Nothing less than control of the heavens was at stake."

Emboldened by the success of Sputnik, Korolev asked Khrushchev for permission to send "biological materials" into space. He had a long history of lofting dogs into the sky on massive rockets that had an unfortunate tendency to explode on liftoff. But in August 1960, one of Korolev's new generation of rockets lifted off with two dogs, 40 mice, a rabbit, a pair of rats, and a bottle full of fruit flies -- and this menagerie orbited Earth 18 times. All returned alive, after which Korolev extended his "biological materials" to include humans.

He began screening Soviet military pilots, thousands of them. The American astronauts in the competing Mercury program may have joked about being "Spam in a can," but it seems clear that Korolev wanted to have plenty of cosmonauts on hand in case another rocket blew up.

One of the cosmonauts was a former fighter pilot named Pavel Romanovich Popovich, a good-humored man who quickly made his way to the top of the class. He was a likely choice to travel on the first manned launch, but, as Walker noted, he was handicapped by being Ukrainian. For even in the supposedly internationalist and multiethnic Soviet Union, the Politburo made clear to Korolev that a Russian had to go up first. (Popovich would have his turn aboard Vostok 4 in August 1962.)

Enter Yuri Gagarin, who ticked all the boxes: He was the son of a carpenter who grew up on a collective farm and had survived the Nazi occupation — though, it would emerge, he was traumatized by the experience, which included the attempted execution of his 5-year-old brother.

Gagarin had gone to trade school, earning top marks, before joining the Soviet Air Force and undergoing pilot training. He excelled as an aviator, and while, as Walker recounted, the head of the Vostok training program exclaimed, "All six cosmonauts are terrific guys," Gagarin led the field from the moment he arrived for training. It helped, of course, that he was Russian.

So it was that on April 12, 1961, Vostok 1 lifted Yuri Gagarin into space, the first human being to travel there. His orbit, which lasted for an hour and 48 minutes, had a few unsettling moments. He lost radio contact with Earth for 23 minutes, during which time, Walker recorded, he amused himself by watching droplets of water float about in the cabin, released from his drinking tube.

He also had only the vaguest idea of where he was when he came back to Earth, at one point crossing over a corner of Antarctica before finally parachuting out over a collective farm like the one of his childhood. "Boys, let's be acquainted," he told the astonished farmers he encountered. "I am the first spaceman in the world, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin."

Khrushchev crowed about the Soviet victory over his capitalist rival. Gagarin was feted, celebrated and put up in the finest hotels the country could offer. Lonely amid all the hubbub, he drank heavily and unhappily. Finally allowed to return to active service after spending time as a delegate to the Supreme Soviet, he died in 1968 in what authorities described as a "routine training flight."

Four months after Gagarin's spaceflight on Vostok 1, cosmonaut Gherman Titov circled Earth 17 times on Vostok 2. It would be another six months before American astronaut John Glenn joined the extraterrestrial elite aboard Friendship 7.

Meanwhile, a frustrated John Kennedy, realizing that the United States would have to find another event in the space race in which to compete, sent a memo to his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, asking, "Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man?"

Johnson conferred with NASA, returning with a projected price tag of $20 billion. Kennedy reversed an earlier round of budget-cutting, first extracting NASA's assurance that an American would be on the Moon by 1970. Kennedy then addressed the nation, saying, "We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share. ... No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."

All of that turned out to be true, all the more so when NASA beat Kennedy's schedule by 164 days and, on July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong, accompanied by Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, piloted the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle to the surface of the Moon.

If only for his part in spurring on the space race 60 years ago, Yuri Gagarin deserves some credit for that transformative moment, too.

Yuri Gagarin wearing a suit and hat: Gagarin waves to crowds who have come to see him at the Soviet exhibition at London's Earls Court, July 11, 1961.

Gagarin waves to crowds who have come to see him at the Soviet exhibition at London's Earls Court, July 11, 1961.

Soviet cosmonaut made pioneering spaceflight 60 years ago

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV4/12/2021

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FILE - In this undated file photo, Soviet cosmonaut Major Yuri Gagarin, first man to orbit the earth, is shown in his space suit. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space 60 years ago. The successful one-orbit flight on April 12, 1961 made the 27-year-old Gagarin a national hero and cemented Soviet supremacy in space until the United States put a man on the moon more than eight years later. (AP Photo/File)

MOSCOW (AP) — Crushed into the pilot’s seat by heavy G-forces, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin saw flames outside his spacecraft and prepared to die. His voice broke the tense silence at ground control: “I’m burning. Goodbye, comrades.”

Gagarin didn’t know that the blazing inferno he observed through a porthole was a cloud of plasma engulfing Vostok 1 during its re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, and he was still on track to return safely.

It was his quiet composure under pressure that helped make him the first human in space 60 years ago.

Gagarin’s steely self-control was a key factor behind the success of his pioneering 108-minute flight. The April 12, 1961, mission encountered glitches and emergencies — from a capsule hatch failing to shut properly just before blastoff to parachute problems in the final moments before touchdown.

From the time 20 Soviet air force pilots were selected to train for the first crewed spaceflight, Gagarin’s calm demeanor, quick learning skills and beaming smile made him an early favorite.

Two days before blastoff, the 27-year-old Gagarin wrote a farewell letter to his wife, Valentina, sharing his pride in being chosen to ride in Vostok 1 but also trying to console her in the event of his death.

“I fully trust the equipment, it mustn’t let me down. But if something happens, I ask you Valyusha not to become broken by grief,” he wrote, using a nickname for her.

Authorities held onto the letter and eventually gave it to Gagarin’s widow seven years later after he died in an airplane crash. She never remarried.

Gagarin’s pioneering, single-orbit flight made him a hero in the Soviet Union and an international celebrity. After putting the world’s first satellite into orbit with the successful launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the Soviet space program, rushed to secure its dominance over the United States by putting a man into space.

“The task was set, and people were sleeping in their offices and factory shops, like at wartime,” Fyodor Yurchikhin, a Russian cosmonaut who eventually made five spaceflights, recalled.

As the Soviet rocket and space program raced to beat the Americans, it suffered a series of launch failures throughout 1960, including a disastrous launch pad explosion in October that killed 126 people. Missile Forces chief Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin was among the victims.

Like Gagarin, Soviet officials were prepared for the worst. No safety system had been installed to save the cosmonaut in case of another rocket explosion at blastoff or after.

Authorities drafted three versions of a bulletin about Gagarin’s flight for the official TASS news agency: one announcing a successful flight, another in case of problems, and the third one for a mission ending in disaster.

Apart from potential engine failures and other equipment malfunctions, scientists questioned an individual’s ability to withstand the conditions of spaceflight. Many worried that a pilot could go mad in orbit.

Soviet engineers prepared for that situation by developing a fully automatic control system. As an extra precaution, the pilot would receive a sealed envelope containing a secret code for activating the capsule’s manual controls. The theory was that a person who could enter the code must be sane enough to operate the ship.

Everyone in the space program liked Gagarin so much, however, that a senior instructor and a top engineer independently shared the secret code with him before the flight to save him the trouble of fiddling with the envelope in case of an emergency.

Problems began right after Gagarin got into Vostok 1, when a light confirming the hatch’s closure did not go on. Working at a frantic pace, a leading engineer and a co-worker removed 32 screws, found and fixed a faulty contact, and put the screws back just in time for the scheduled launch.

Sitting in the capsule, Gagarin whistled a tune. “Poyekhali!” — “Off we go!” — he shouted as the rocket blasted off.

As another precaution, the orbit was planned so the spacecraft would descend on its own after a week if an engine burn failure stranded the ship. Instead, a glitch resulted in a higher orbit that would have left Gagarin dead if the engine had malfunctioned at that stage.

While the engine worked as planned to send the ship home, a fuel loss resulted in an unexpected reentry path and a higher velocity that made the ship rotate wildly for 10 agonizing minutes.

Gagarin later said he nearly blacked out while experiencing G-forces exceeding 10 times the pull of gravity. “There was a moment lasting two or three seconds when instruments started fading before my eyes,” he recalled.

Seeing a cloud of fiery plasma around his ship on re-entry, he thought his ship was burning.

A soft-landing system hadn’t been designed yet, so Gagarin ejected from the module in his spacesuit and deployed a parachute. While descending, he had to fiddle with a sticky valve on his spacesuit to start breathing outside air. A reserve chute unfolded in addition to the main parachute, making it hard for him to control his descent, but he landed safely on a field near the Volga River in the Saratov region.

Gagarin was flown to Moscow to a hero’s welcome, hailed by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and greeted by enthusiastic crowds cheering his flight as a triumph on par with the victory in World War II. In the years before he died at age 34, he basked in international glory, visiting dozens of countries to celebrate his historic mission.

“The colossal propaganda effect of the Sputnik launch and particularly Gagarin’s flight was very important,” Moscow-based aviation and space expert Vadim Lukashevich said. “We suddenly beat America even though our country hadn’t recovered yet from the massive damage and casualties” from World War II.

Gagarin was killed in a training jet crash on March 27, 1968. Not quite 16 months later, the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in the space race, putting an astronaut on the moon.

The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union ended the era of rivalry. Russia’s efforts to develop new rockets and spacecraft have faced endless delays, and the country has continued to rely on Soviet-era technology. Amid the stagnation, the much-criticized state space corporation Roscosmos has focused on a costly plan to build its new, rocket-shaped headquarters on the site of a dismantled rocket factory.

___

Associated Press journalists Kostya Manenkov and Kirill Zarubin in Moscow contributed to this report.

TODAY IN HISTORY
40th anniversary of first space shuttle orbital mission a bittersweet occasion

By Paul Brinkmann

The entrance to the "Rubber Room" under Launch Complex 39A opens 32 years to the day since NASA launched space shuttle Columbia on its maiden voyage. The space agency is making final preparations to close down the pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 12, 2013. Photo by Joe Marino-Bill Cantrell/UPI | License Photo


ORLANDO, Fla., April 9 (UPI) -- The 40th anniversary Monday of the first orbital flight of a space shuttle -- Columbia -- evokes the accomplishments of the program, but also a grim reminder of tragedies during its existence.

The first shuttle orbital flight in April 1981 revolutionized space exploration because it proved a reusable, piloted space plane could succeed.

But that legacy also offered perilous lessons. Space shuttle flights were canceled in 2011 after 14 astronauts perished in two accidents.

"We had two terrible tragedies that shouldn't have happened," Bob Crippen, 83, who piloted Columbia, told UPI in a recent interview.

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"But it was quite a vehicle that allowed us to do some great things in space, bring over 300 people to space -- a much more diverse group of people than ever before. And I'm proud of it."


NASA built six shuttles -- one flew tests, while the others flew 135 space missions from 1981 to 2011, all launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA first created the shuttle Enterprise as a test vehicle that flew only in Earth's atmosphere. Following that, Rockwell International turned out Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, in that order.

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Shuttles carried the first American woman into space, Sally Ride, and the first Black American, Guion Bluford, in 1983. They also launched important spacecraft, such as the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, and they transported large segments of the International Space Station.

Long before the space station existed, shuttle missions led to advances in understanding how the low gravity of space affected people and materials. The shuttle also carried a set of special radar instruments to map previously uncharted jungles and mountaintops.

Disaster first struck the program in 1986 when the Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff. NASA recovered and launched shuttles successfully for the next 15 years until Columbia exploded during re-entry over Texas. Each tragedy killed all seven astronauts on board.

The final flight, an Atlantis mission, came on July 8, 2011, with a four-astronaut crew. It delivered electronics equipment to the space station.

UPI Audio · 40th anniversary of NASA shuttle program

As the 40th anniversary of the first launch approached, Crippen recalled celebrating many previous anniversaries with his crewmate, the late John Young, commander of the first mission. Young died in 2018 at age 87.

"John Young was the natural, right pick for that initial flight because he was their most experienced astronaut. He had flown to space four times and walked on the moon on Apollo 16," said Crippen, who noted he was a rookie when selected for the mission.

"I was his friend, and I'm sorry he's not here to mark this anniversary with us," he said.

Young was aware of the age difference between the two, according to a quote attributed to him by the New Mexico Museum of Space History, where Young is a Hall of Fame inductee.

"My heart rate wasn't as high as his [Crippen] because I'm so dang old and it just wouldn't go any faster" during the first shuttle launch, Young said. He was 50 that day; Crippen was 43.

Crippen remembered the first shuttle launch as a boost for the country's morale, coming as President Ronald Reagan recovered from a gunshot wound after a March 30 assassination attempt. The nation also dealt with inflation and a rise in unemployment during a recession in 1980.

The first flight had few problems, with the shuttle performing almost exactly as planned, he said.

"John and I found that the space shuttle -- the fact that it did succeed on that first launch -- really did kind of bring the country together, so I think it had a lot of positive support once we got to that first flight," Crippen said.

He said he always regretted that the United States canceled the shuttle without a replacement vehicle for U.S. human spaceflight. A replacement finally arrived after nine years with the launch of a crewed SpaceX Dragon capsule aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

"It was a sad day for me when the last flight occurred," Crippen said.

The first orbital launch of shuttle captured public attention as the first human space venture from U.S. soil since 1975's Apollo-Soyuz Test Project with the Soviet Union, said Piers Bizony, a space historian and author of space books that include Space Shuttle: 40th Anniversary.

The United States employed a Saturn 1B rocket for its portion of the mission, and it was the last flight of that kind of rocket. The focus then turned to developing a reusable spacecraft.

"There was huge public interest in this major new adventure, especially as it seemed to promise a new era of regular and routine access to orbit," Bizony said in an interview.

But getting funding for the shuttle from Congress and President Richard Nixon's administration in the 1970s was difficult, Bizony said.

"Many people assumed the space race [with the Soviet Union] had been won with Apollo 11, so there didn't seem to be any need for another grand astronaut program," he said. "President Nixon's advisers eventually persuaded him that the shuttle was important as a way of maintaining American leadership in space."

NASA described the average cost of a shuttle mission as $450 million, but the program consumed a total of over $190 billion in 2010 dollars, so the average cost actually was more than $1 billion per mission.

Ultimately, Bizony said, it was the regularity of shuttle missions that led to complacency regarding risks, particularly during re-entry. Columbia disintegrated when super-heated air entered a wing where foam falling off a fuel tank had damaged the spacecraft during launch, according to NASA.

Challenger, on the other hand, blew up moments after being launched on Jan. 28, 1986. NASA personnel had dismissed warnings from engineers that cold weather in Florida that morning could create problems with circular gaskets that sealed part of the rocket's boosters.

A failure in such a gasket, or O-ring, led to the deadly explosion.

"Unfortunately, in the shuttle era, by the time a few flights had gone off without too many problems, the agency began to believe that the system was safe to fly, but it never really was," Bizony said.

One of the biggest flaws, he said, was the lack of an escape system, which is one reason NASA returned to space capsules that can abort more easily during launch.

Former astronauts, like shuttle pilot Sid Gutierrez, are marking the anniversary of the first shuttle flight in their own way.

"The first shuttle launch definitely said to the world, we're back -- the U.S. is back in leadership for spaceflight," Gutierrez said in an interview. "But we mistakenly thought spaceflight was routine then, partly because NASA sold it that way. Spaceflight was never going to be routine."

Shuttle safety issues are why Gutierrez is trying to develop a safer rocket engine at his Florida company, Vaya Space, he said. The company is testing a solid rocket fuel core that could be easier to shut off after ignition than purely solid rockets, which is what the shuttle's boosters were.

The retired shuttles are on display around the country. Discovery, which flew the most missions, 39, is on display at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., near Washington D.C. It's temporarily closed because of the pandemic.

Atlantis is at the visitor complex outside Kennedy Space Center. Endeavor is in the California Science Center in Los Angeles. And the original shuttle, the Enterprise, is on display at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City.

Dutch man arrested in theft of van Gogh, Hals paintings

"Spring Garden" by Vincent van Gogh was stolen from the Singer Laren museum on March 30, 2020. File Photo by Marten de Leeuw/EPA-EFE/HANDOUT


April 6 (UPI) -- Dutch police announced Tuesday that they arrested a man suspected of stealing two paintings -- one by Vincent van Gogh and the other by Frans Hals.

Neither painting, stolen in separate museum heists on separate dates, has been recovered.

Law enforcement said they arrested a 58-year-old man at his home in Baarn. A statement from police didn't include his name.

"This arrest is an important step in the investigation," Dutch police said in a statement.

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He's accused of stealing van Gogh's De Lentetuin, which, in English is known as Spring Garden, the vicarage garden in Nuenen in the spring, on March 30, 2020, from the Singer Laren museum. The 1884 painting was on loan at the time from the Groninger Museum.

Police at the time said the thief or thieves broke a large glass door at the front of the museum and tripped a burglar alarm.

The painting, which is about 15 inches by 28 inches, depicts the garden of the Dutch Reformist Church in Nuenen, which is where van Gogh's father was a vicar.

In June, Dutch art detective Arthur Brand said he received "proof of life" photos of the painting, which included a copy of The New York Times dated May 30 and the cover of the book Master Thief: The Bizarre Experiences of Van Gogh Robber Okkie Durham.

A 1626 painting by Hals called Two Laughing Boys was reported stolen from the Het Hofje van Aerden museum Aug. 27.

The painting has been stolen and recovered twice before -- once in 1988 along with a Jacob van Ruidael painting, and again in 2011.

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Hals, who died in 1666, worked as part of the Dutch Golden Age of painting, which included other masters such as Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt van Rijn. He was known for his realistic portraits of various members of society, not just the wealthy.

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U.S. 'concerned' by Saudi Arabia's sentencing of aid worker and critic

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sentenced aid worker Abdulrahman al-Sadhan to 20 years in prison as the Biden administration has vowed to hold the country accountable for its human rights abuses. Photo by G20 Riyadh Summit/EPA-EFE

April 6 (UPI) -- The United States said it was "concerned" Tuesday over reports that Saudi Arabia had sentenced aid worker Abdulrahman al-Sadhan to 20 years in prison followed by a 20-year travel ban over allegations he ran an anonymous Twitter account critical of Riyadh.

In a statement, Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, said al-Sadhan, 37, had been sentenced by a counterterrorism court.

"We will continue to monitor this case closely throughout any appeal process," Price said. "As we have said to Saudi officials at all levels, freedom of expression should never be a punishable offense."

U.S. citizen Areej al-Sadhan, the humanitarian aid worker's sister, confirmed Tuesday the court had sought the stiff penalty, calling it "insane."

"No words can describe how I feel," she said following the sentencing. "This BRUTAL & UNJUST ruling is just a reminder of the horrible situation the Saudi people are in."

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., condemned the sentencing of al-Sadhan for engaging in peaceful dissent anonymously as "brutal.

"This act continues Saudi Arabia's profoundly disturbing assault on the freedom of expression and its pattern of human rights abuses, which must be condemned by all freedom-loving people worldwide," she said in a statement.

Al-Sadhan was detained on March 12, 2018, by Saudi authorities at the main offices of the Saudi Red Crescent Society where he worked in Riyadh, according to the London-based Gulf Center for Human Rights.

The sentencing attracted condemnation from activists and human rights groups, including ALQST for Human Rights, which called on Saudi authorities to release al-Sadhan and to drop all charges against him.

"In a trial marred by violations of fair trail guarantees, al-Sadhan was tried under the counter-terrorism and anti-cybercrime laws, which are frequently used to stifle free speech in Saudi Arabia," the organization tweeted.

The sentencing came as the Biden administration has said it will take a stronger stance against Saudi Arabia over its human rights abuses than the previous Trump administration did.

During his presidential campaign, then-Democratic candidate Joe Biden vowed to treat the Middle Eastern country as "the pariah that they are."

As president, Biden paused arms deals with Saudi Arabia and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has vowed to put human rights at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy.

In February, a U.S. intelligence report identified Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as approving the operation to kill journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In response, the United States banned 76 Saudis under a ban that bears Khashoggi's name.

"We'll apply the ban to officials from any country that targets dissidents beyond its border," Blinken said late last month.

Pelosi said in her statement Tuesday that Congress stands with Biden as he seeks to hold Saudi Arabia accountable through visa denials and sanctions.

"Congress will continue to monitor this case closely throughout any appeals process, as well as any other human rights abuse in Saudi Arabia," she said. "Riyadh needs to know that the world is watching its disturbing actions and that we will hold it accountable."