These funds are to be dispersed in grants to complement and expand Gulf restoration efforts. To date, the NFWF Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund has awarded grants to Alabama , Florida , and Mississippi to increase research, data collection, and stranding response capacity for Gulf marine mammals and sea turtles.
The committee provided its guidance for restoration, assessment, and synthesis in its report on Effective Monitoring to Evaluate Ecological Restoration in the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico Alliance GOMA is a partnership of the five Gulf states and other organizations whose goal is to increase regional collaboration to enhance the environmental and economic health of the Gulf. GOMA has developed the Deepwater Horizon Project Tracker as a tool to track restoration, research, and recovery projects resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System GCOOS provides observational data, models, and products for a wide variety of users in the Gulf region, and is integrated with other regional coastal ocean observing systems to create an integrated and sustained U.
Sea Grant in the Gulf of Mexico provides information to help increase knowledge and awareness of oil spill science topics, including the impacts of the oil spill on bottlenose dolphins and other wildlife. Letter to the U. Letter to the Deepwater Horizon Open Ocean Trustee Implementation Group on its draft restoration plan 2 and environmental assessment: Fish, sea turtles, marine mammals, and mesophotoic and deep benthic communitees. Letter to BOEM on its request for information on the development of a long-term monitoring plan for marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico.
Fish and Wildlife Service on the programmatic environmental impact statement PEIS to evaluate the environmental consequences of restoration projects and newly planned projects following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Letter to NMFS on recommendations and rationale to assist the Deepwater Horizon Natural Resource Damage Assessment Trustee Council in developing a restoration plan to address injuries from the oil spill, including those to marine mammals and their habitats.
The objectives of the meeting were to: Provide an overview of marine mammal stocks and human activities. Review marine mammal research and monitoring programs. Identify high priority, overarching marine mammal data needs for the next years. Discuss options for collaborations to facilitate long-term research planning, information sharing, and capacity building. Marine mammal injury assessment studies were conducted from to and included: Aerial surveys to track changes in abundance and shifts in spatial distribution relative to baseline pre-spill conditions.
Satellite and radio tracking of individual animals to assess movements, distribution, and preferred habitat. Analysis of samples from stranded animals and live-captured wild dolphins to determine potential exposure to oil or other contaminants and secondary effects of disease or contaminant exposure on health.
Passive acoustic monitoring to determine the presence and movements of vocalizing animals. Prey sampling albeit limited to assess distribution and abundance as well as potential exposure to oil or other contaminants. To date, GOMRI-funded projects that have focused on investigating the impacts of the oil spill on marine mammals include the following: Consortium for Advanced Research on Marine Mammal Health Assessment CARMMHA — a team of marine mammal health scientists conducting cross-discipline research that includes veterinary assessments of managed animals, field assessments with wild populations, and integrative statistical modeling.
Natalia Sidorovskaia, University of Louisiana, which uses expertise from marine acoustics, biology, physics, engineering, mathematics, and computational predictive modeling. Cynthia Smith, National Marine Mammal Foundation, to adapt and test cutting edge medical technologies for evaluating potential reproductive system disorders and then integrate those technologies for dolphin capture-release field studies in Barataria Bay.
John Hildebrand and Dr. But conditions on the Deepwater Horizon rig were particularly concerning. After the spill, the commission created by the Obama administration to investigate the spill reached stark, damning conclusions. Many lapses in safety had contributed to the disaster , many of which traced back to a culture both within BP and the industry more broadly that did not value safety enough. A new agency, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement BSEE , was created to track and enforce offshore drilling safety issues, something that had been handled by the same agency that approved leases to oil companies.
BSEE announced a new set of safety rules for offshore operations in Among those rules was one that required blowout protectors—the piece that had failed at Deepwater Horizon—to be inspected by a third party, rather than self-certified by the drilling companies. But many of those rules, as well as other safety practices put in place after the disaster, have been weakened in recent years. Most notably, in the Trump administration finalized rollbacks of several components of the rules, including the independent safety certification for blowout protectors and bi-weekly testing.
Today, more than 50 percent of Gulf oil production comes from ultra-deep wells drilled in 4, feet or more of water, compared with about 4, feet for Deepwater Horizon. The deeper the well, the more the risk: A study showed that for every hundred feet deeper a well is drilled, the likelihood of a company self-reported incident like a spill or an injury increased by more than 8 percent.
After the Exxon Valdez spill, for example, new laws and regulations were enacted to deal with future tanker spills. Another concern, says Scott Eustis, the science director at the Louisiana-based Healthy Gulf, a group that focuses on marine protection, comes from the ever-increasing pressures of climate change.
Louisiana, which has the most comprehensive climate adaptation plan in the region, is expecting the number and intensity of major hurricanes to increase within the next 50 years.
Each storm that blows through the Gulf threatens offshore drilling infrastructure. But scientists realized they lacked much of the basic background science necessary to predict where, when, and how the oil would spread or what its impacts on the region would be. At first, it was difficult even to assess how much oil spilled from the well.
Early initial assessments were low—but satellite imagery revealed that there was much more oil than had been reported. The final tally showed that the spill dumped more than million gallons of oil. Oil continued to sink to the ocean floor for more than a year, a recent study shows.
It changed the amounts of sediment collecting on the bottom of the sea for years afterward and choked them of oxygen. Immediately after the spill, the 1, miles of contaminated coasts saw oil concentrations times higher than background levelsl even eight years later , concentrations were 10 times higher than before the spill.
And In February of this year, a study showed that the footprint of the oil spread some 30 percent wider than previously estimated, potentially contaminating many more fish communities than previously thought. There is still more research needed to understand the effects of dispersant. A modeling effort supported by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative offered evidence that the dispersants injected into the Macondo wellhead may not have helped to lessen the amount of oil reaching the surface after all.
A lot of research is still needed to fully understand the long-term effects of dispersants and oil on the region and its inhabitants—not to mention how they move through the food chain to impact larger predators, such as people. Researchers are developing new dispersants that cause less environmental damage for the next spill. See "Human Health Impacts. There were some immediate impacts to the animals of the Gulf of Mexico that could be seen with the naked eye: pelicans black with oil, fish belly-up in brown sludge, smothered turtles washed up on beaches.
But many of the long-term effects from the spill cannot be seen with the naked eye. Many exposed animals initially weathered the spill but then were marred with health problems for years afterward. Strandings of both dolphins and sea turtles increased significantly in the years following the spill.
From the time of the spill in to , over a thousand dolphins were found stranded along the shores of the Gulf. Many of the dolphins suffered from lung disease, increased stress, and a compromised immune system.
Those that did not survive became part of the largest and longest dolphin die-off in the recoded history of the Northern Gulf of Mexico. Since then, dolphin deaths have declined, but dolphins in hard-hit Barataria Bay continue to have issues giving birth to healthy babies.
Only 20 percent of pregnant mothers successfully carry their babies to full term, while in other areas the rate is around 80 percent. Many also continue to suffer from lung disease, and in many cases their lung health is worse than at the time of the spill. Monitoring of sea turtles both during and after the spill was difficult, though an understanding of general sea turtle behavior allowed scientists to estimate that up to , turtles died because of the spill.
The number of Kemp's ridley sea turtle nests have gone down in the years since the spill, and long-term effects are not yet known. Seabirds were initially harmed by crude surface oi l—even a small bit of oil on their feathers impeded their ability to fly, swim and find food by diving. Those that ingested the oil experienced severe health issues including anemia, weight loss, hypothermia, heart and liver abnormalities, delayed egg laying, decreased eggshell thickness, gastrointestinal dysfunction, and death.
Ninety-three species of birds were affected by the spill, and it is estimated that , coastal and , offshore birds died. Invertebrates in the Gulf were hit hard by the Deepwater Horizon spill—both in coastal areas and in the deep ocean.
Shrimp fisheries were closed for much of the year following the spill, but these commercially-important species now seem to have recovered. Deep-water corals grow very slowly and can live for many centuries. Found as deep as 4, feet below the surface, corals near the blowout showed signs of tissue damage and were covered by an unknown brown substance, later identified as oil from the spill.
Laboratory studies conducted with coral species showed that coral larvae exposed to oil and dispersant had lower survival rates and difficulty settling on a hard surface to grow. The impact of the spill on fish populations is still largely unknown, though the study of specific fish species indicates that there could be long-lasting effects for fish exposed to oil. Initially, fishermen reported an uptick in fish with skin lesions.
But scientists also know that there are likely chronic health defects associated with oil exposure. Lab studies have shown that oil can cause heart defects in both developing larvae and adult fish. A significant study of adult mahi-mahi showed that even 24 hours of oil exposure leads to changes in their heart.
Researchers are producing a system that assesses the vulnerability of various fish species to oil exposure, which will provide important information to those responding to oil spills. Microbes, however, were one of the few groups of species to actually benefit from the spill.
While a lot of bacteria are impacted by oil toxicity like most every other living species, a select group of bacteria are oil lovers. Life in the Gulf of Mexico has exposed them to small traces of oil from natural seeps and they have evolved to take advantage of this novel resource. After the spill they grew slowly at first, but once they reached their peak in early June, the microbes were consuming methane at among the fastest rates ever reported for the open ocean—some 60,times faster than methanotrophs living at a methane seep.
While oil-loving bacteria are usually scarce, after the oil spill they accounted for about 90 percent of the microbes in contaminated water. This had a ripple effect in the community as smaller animals ate the bacteria. Some fish larvae populations actually grew after the spill, as they had more food in the form of oil-eating microbes. Over 1, miles of shoreline on the Gulf of Mexico , from Texas to Florida, was impacted by oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout.
Much of this area has been cleaned, but eroded shorelines are taking longer to recover and erosion rates have accelerated in these areas. You can explore more ecosystem effects in our interactive. When the wellhead ruptured, oil quickly leaked into the surrounding water, about 5, feet beneath the sea surface. At the wellhead, 16 to 17 percent of the oil was recovered during cleanup efforts and piped onto nearby ships for storage and removal.
The remaining oil was pumped with chemical dispersant and began to rise. Like the salad dressing in a shaken bottle, the oil began to float toward the sea surface, as oil is less dense than water.
Yet on its way upward, a little less than half of the oil was halted at about 3, feet 1, meters below the surface where it then formed a suspended plume.
Scientists are unsure why this happened but believe the hot oil influenced ocean currents, which then trapped the oil deep underwater. Mixed with dispersant, the oil formed many tiny droplets and became neutrally buoyant—the same density as the surrounding water. The suspended plume then encountered a southern flowing current which pushed the oil into the continental slope, the seafloor that rises from the ocean depths up to the seashore. That a new spill will one day meet gulf shores has become and article of faith.
Unfortunately, efforts to control a new slick will likely look much as they did after the Deepwater Horizon, with armadas of local fishermen once again mustered onto the front lines and toiling in a haze of chemicals.
As the oil eventually receded, many who fought to clean it up became seriously ill. Many of them have died of respiratory complications, including cancer. In the days following the blowout, some 47, people, mostly newly jobless fisherman, were contracted by BP to pilot their boats into the slick pulling skimmers. Others worked in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida to siphon oil off the beaches.
Almost immediately, thousands of them broke out in rashes. They began to cough up blood and developed wheezes. Some were plagued with migraines.
Many complained of burning eyes and memory loss. Still others were struggled with new heart aliments, kidney problems, liver damage, and discharge from their ears.
Some experienced cognitive decline and anxiety attacks. What all of them had in common is their exposure to Corexit, an oil dispersant that contains an array of toxic chemicals, but which BP assured the workers was as safe to use as dishwashing liquid. From the first days of the spill through the eventual capping of the well that following July, BP oversaw the dumping of 7 million liters of the dispersant from airplanes flown over the Gulf.
Ten years later, controversy still rages about the wisdom of carpet-bombing the Gulf with these chemicals, and documents released since reveal that government scientists expressed concern at the time about the health consequences of mixing such large quantities of dispersants with the millions of barrels of sweet crude.
Oil and dispersants are a toxic stew. When the two are combined, they unleash heavy metals and hydrocarbons like benzene, hexane, and toluene, which are known carcinogens. Dispersants like Corexit contain solvents meant to break oil down into tiny droplets that sink.
But when ocean water evaporates, so do these chemicals. When they are carried inland by the wind, they can sicken those who inhale them. In their interviews, many of these patients who worked on spill cleanup said they were discouraged by BP contractors from using protective gear, even though, as study later showed , Corexit, when mixed with oil is 52 times more toxic than oil alone. Those who complained were met with efforts to silence them.
In their affidavits and interviews, former cleanup workers attested to being the victims of an intimidation campaign for revealing they were ill.
0コメント