Imagine that you're spending the day at the beach and see a barge dumping 19-ton subway cars into the ocean right before your eyes.  Either you've been out in the sun too long or have had one too many. Because it couldn't be...could it?

No need to get your eyes checked. As The New York Times reported earlier this year, The Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, is creating an artificial coral reef by using old, donated New York City Redbird subway cars. Instead of trashing them, they're putting them to work for the environment.

The cars are placed 16 miles off of the coast (in an area appropriately named the Red Bird Reef) in an effort to transform a "barren stretch of ocean floor into a bountiful oasis, carpeted in sea grasses, walled thick with blue mussels and sponges, and teeming with black sea bass and tautog," states The New York Times.

That's right: recycled subway cars as fish condos. But why the need for artificial reefs?

It's no secret that the world’s coral reefs are rapidly disappearing due to the fatal combination of global warming, human exploitation and pollution. Jeremy Jackson, director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the University of California, San Diego, outlines the harsh reality: one-third of coral species are threatened with extinction, dead-zones have spread to 415 sites, half of U.S. reefs are in fair or bad condition, there's been an increase in ocean acidification, tuna and shark populations are collapsing (disrupting the entire food chain), and only four percent of the ocean is considered pristine. Yikes.

While there are many causes that need to be addressed, something had to be done in the meantime to replace these disappearing reefs.

And The Red Bird Reef has indeed been successful. It now supports more than 10,000 angler trips annually, up from fewer than 300 in 1997. Plus, it's seen a 400-fold increase in the amount of marine food per square foot in the last seven years, according to state data.

Like me at first, you may be a bit skeptical: don't the cars contain some asbestos? How environmentally safe is this really? Is it nothing more than sanctioned garbage dumping?

Not to worry. State and federal environmental officials approved the use of the cars because the asbestos is not a risk for marine life and has to be airborne to pose a threat to humans. And the cars are not disrupting marine life when placed on the ocean floor because nothing exists in the area at the time they're placed.  Once placed, they do not drift – so you won't come across a beached subway car anytime soon.

Artificial reefs may not be the magical solution for our diminishing marine ecosystems – not by a long shot. But we can't ignore that these reefs have helped achieve small successes in rebuilding marine life that has been lost.

Images obtained from original NYT article which can be viewed here.
Photo credit: Tim Shaffer for The New York Times