Aug. 12, 2010 — A writer friend and colleague, Melissa Gaskill, and I recently returned from our Great Gulf Coast Road Trip Adventure. Our mission was to talk to the scientists who are investigating the long-term impacts of the spill and to get a first-hand look at the area. We traveled to the coasts of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.
Melissa Gaskill and me on our road trip
The first day of our trip we arrived at the sleepy little coastal town of Ocean Springs, where we met with several biologists at the Gulf Coast Research. There we met Harriet Perry, a woman ocean scientist who has been working as a biologist for some 40 years. She started her career in science when women were not even allowed on oceanographic research vessels! Today, she’s in the news as the biologist who has discovered that the dispersed oil droplets may be making their way into the food web. She studies blue crab larvae. She told us that nearly every single larvae she has examined contains a drop of oil under its tiny barely formed shell. As these baby crabs grow, they molt, or shed their shell for a bigger one. In the molting process this oil droplet is being past to the new shell. This means that any organism that eats the crab larvae is going to be eating oil.
Christine Trigg, the blue crab hatchery supervisor, and Harriet Perry with a blue crab adult
That night we stayed in Mobile, Alabama, and the next morning, we met with biologists Judy Haner and Jeff DeQuattro from The Nature Conservancy-Alabama who took us into Mobile Bay to show us two things – their oyster reef restoration projects, which is a project funded through stimulus money, and the impact of the spill on offshore barrier islands.
Judy Haner on the boat on the way out to the barrier islands
The oyster reef restoration project is important because 85 percent of oyster reefs worldwide have disappeared. Here in the Gulf Coast, oysters were harvested for their shells in order to build roads and other construction projects. The removal of the reefs combined with an increase in boats making their way in and out of bays and bayous, exposes the fragile marshes to wave action never seen before. Of course, as filter feeders, both direct contacts and suspended droplets have the potential to impact oysters.
Judy pulls up one of the bags of oyster shells, which they place in shallow water to attract oyster larvae. The oyster bags also provide structure, and hence habitat, for a lot of little critters until a big oyster reef ultimately grows.
After we got back to shore we headed across Mobile Bay to the Fort Morgan peninsula – a narrow, 20-mile or so strip of land that is called the Alabama Gulf Shores region. This area is truly an underappreciated gem, just miles from Florida and with the same white sugar sand beaches. The Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge is located here and is homem to miles of untrammeled beach dunes, nesting sea turtles and dune vegetation. The refuge was created specifically to help save an endangered species – the Alabama Beach Mouse.
Sea oats along along the beach on Fort Morgan peninsula
While we strolled along the beach, I kept noticing little brown pebbles and rocks in the surf. At one point I reached down and picked up one of the “rocks” and squished it between my fingers. Bad idea! It was a tarball. And the more I looked the more I realized they were everywhere. The question remains whether these tarballs are actually damaging to the beach as opposed to just being messy. A lot of money has been spent on cleaning up the beaches, but although that may be important for tourism, biologically, most scientists are more concerned about the damage of the dispersants, and dispersed oil out in the greater Gulf – far away from human eyes.
Tar balls dot the shoreline
On day four, it was time to head back toward home, but first we stopped in Louisiana and visited St. Tammany Parish, in the Northshore of Louisiana. This area lies north of New Orleans, and specifically north of Lake Ponchartrain, which got international attention after Hurricane Katrina. Many shrimpers and fishermen work here, and at the Rigolets Marina. The area perfectly exemplifies the fact that even though the oil hasn’t hit in full force, it has started impacting the economy. “At first, impact was primarily due to the perception that oil was all over,” says Renee Kientz, Communications Director for St. Tammany Parish Tourist Commission. “Our charter fishermen, swamp tours and other water-related businesses were experiencing a decline in business – and a lot of phone calls from concerned would-be visitors.”
We decided to pay Dr. Wagner’s Honey Island Swamp Tour a visit, and got to see several alligators, from small to massive. The big concern is that if this area gets a big hurricane — which is very possible with the storm predictions this year — storm surge could very easily bring oil into these fragile inland marshes.”
We dined that evening at Palmettos restaurant in Olde Towne Slidell on local Gulf seafood to support the local economy. We sat out on the patio overlooking the Bayou Bonfouca. I asked our waitress how the oil spill had affected the economy and what I heard from her and at other restaurants we visited is that many customers are concerned and don’t want to eat Gulf seafood.
On our final day of the road trip, I got a last minute phone call from the Coast Guard saying they had a couple of spots on a plane that was doing a flyover of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Did I want to go? You betcha! We rushed to the airport. Coast Guard’s federal on-scene coordinator, Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft, and NOAA Science Support Coordinator, Steve Lehmann, came along with us to answer questions. Once we reached the well site, the rear part of the airplane was opened so reporters could film and we could shoot photos. The plane circled pretty tightly around the well site several times. At least one reporter had his head in his lap due to motion sickness, but after my Bering Sea adventure, flying high above the rough sea was a piece of cake.
Matt Gutman, a reporter for ABC News, and me on the plane, feeling fine
The Great Gulf Coast Road Trip Adventure was enlightening and since some of the press about the spill has died down, it was good to go the area and speak to the people still on the ground dealing with the devastation and trying to understand the long-term affects. Although the federal government has since released an overly optimistic report, the biologists I spoke with seem to have grave concern over what is happening with all the dispersed oil that has now sunk deep into the ocean where it can have the most devastating impacts on marine biota. All we can say is, time will tell.
A view of the Louisiana coastal marsh and estuaries from the air
July 23, 2010 — I arrived home from my adventures on the Bering Sea a few days ago. Here as some of my thoughts about the last 27 days aboard the Thomas G. Thompson.
July 22, 2010 – Well, I’ve teased you with the slide show, now see the video. As a reminder this is a contest I participated in while aboard the Thomas G. Thompson in the middle of the Bering Sea to see who’s faster at putting on a survival suit, also known as Gumby suits. These suits can save your life, but they’re a challenge to put on and you’re supposed to be able to do it in under 60 seconds!
July 19, 2010 — Brian Hoover and Sarah Jennings spend most of their time on the bridge. They are gathering data on the birds of the Bering Sea. Sarah and Brian talk with me about their work and what it’s like living on the Thomas G. Thompson for 30 days at a stretch.
Somewhere in the Bering Sea, July 8, 2010 — David Shull, an oceanography professor at Western Washington University, the chief scientist on board the Thomas G. Thompson, and head of the mud team, sat down with me to explain why we’re here in the middle of the Bering Sea looking for what appear to be alien lifeforms.
Somewhere in the Bering Sea, July 1, 2010 – I suppose the most important excitement of the last few days was that I made my first vlog. I was hoping to be able to upload it for Adventures in Climate Change but I couldn’t get it to send. You will just have to wait until I’m back home. However you can see photos below of the subject. I did a Gumby suit contest. These are survival suits that you put on if you should ever have to abandon ship, God forbid, in these near-freezing waters. These Gumby suits can save your life, but they’re challenging to put on, and you’re supposed to be able to do it in under 60 seconds.
Somewhere in the Bering Sea, June 30, 2010 – A week or so ago I headed to the Bering Sea and now I’m on board the R/V Thompson. I’ve joined a group of scientists on the Bering Sea Project, a joint project of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the North Pacific Research Board (NPRB). I applied for a spot on board, and got accepted as the sole journalist.
I’ll be calling into Adventures periodically to tell you about the science that’s happening on board, what life is like on the rolling seas, and any other tidbits that come my way. Here’s the first audio slide show.
Can the Oilpocalypse spur lasting change, or will it just be another environmental disaster?
May 27, 2010 — I have to admit it overwhelms my feeble mind to imagine the crude oil that continues gushing, unabated, into the Gulf of Mexico. What officials still call 5,000 barrels per day, Purdue University engineer Steven Wereley independently assessed as 70,000 barrels, or nearly 3 million gallons, per day. Scientists on board the research vessel Pelican — an excursion sponsored by the NOAA-funded National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology — reported giant plumes of oil under the ocean surface, some 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and 300 feet thick.
As we enjoyed frozen yogurt yesterday here in Houston, my boyfriend asked, “Have they stopped that oil yet?” We all go on with our daily lives — driving cars, using electricity, tossing plastic bottles and bags in the trash, and the oil continues to gush. Efforts to stop and contain the spill have mostly fizzled. The space-age containment dome failed. Robots didn’t stop the flow. And now BP has a hotline for citizens to send in ideas. Seriously?
We have emergency exit maps for buildings. Schools run tornado and fire drills. There’s an emergency broadcast system. Yet it boggles my brain that oil companies have no clear, readily implemented solution for a gushing geyser of oil, despite more than 700 rigs throughout the Gulf of Mexico and many more around the globe. It seems a no-brainer that companies should have concrete and viable solutions for such emergencies before they start drilling on the ocean floor. Perhaps I am idealistic.
A welder fabricates a pollution containment chamber. This chamber, which should have been built and tested before the oil spill on April 20, was not ready for deployment until May 7.
And in fact, BP lobbied the Council on Environmental Quality to give such categorical exclusions more often, since it took too much time to fill out “unnecessary paperwork,” especially when “impacts associated with the proposed action are minimal or nonexistent.” I am not making this up. They want to drill, baby, drill, to hell with the fishermen, the fish, your health, the Gulf.
The Gulf oilpocalypse includes not just the millions of gallons of crude oil but also the chemical dispersants sprayed in the ocean to break up the oil slicks. It may ultimately kill hundreds of billions of individual marine critters when you count larvae, young and adults alike of such uncelebrated critters like phyto- and zooplankton, jellyfish, krill, sea pens, sea stars, shrimp and fish. A jellyfish graveyard was reported by science writer Mark Schrope, on board the Pelican. We’ll never know the true number of organisms that die, but if the critters at the bottom of the food web crash out, ecological chain reactions will occur, and eventually we may see declines in commercially important fish, sea turtles, whales or dolphins.
A plane delivers dispersants to the oil spill
On May 12, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that these oil dispersants, “are used to move us towards the lesser of two difficult environmental outcomes.” CNN reported that, “experts say dispersants, while toxic, are much less toxic than oil.” The scientific research I found argues otherwise. A study led by Queen’s University’s Peter Hodson found that the dispersant used in this very Gulf spill, Corexit 9500, actually increased uptake of the oil by fish. By breaking large swaths of crude into tiny droplets, the dispersants make the oil’s polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) more biologically available, and hence more toxic. It also keeps the oil offshore, rather than washing up on land where people can see it firsthand. People tend to not get outraged when they don’t see the immediate, direct effects. That does not mean the oil and dispersants won’t ultimately devastate the Gulf ecosystem.
A pelican swims in a make-shift pool after being cleaned of oil. More harmful effects may be happening to the animals and ecosystem in the unseen world of the deep ocean.
“Because ‘oil and water don’t mix’ most of the components of the crude oil stay at the surface and make trouble for critters on the surface, like birds and sea otters, but fish and other things that stay below the surface are exposed to very little,” explains Rutgers University marine toxicologist Judith Weis. “When you add dispersants, you make the oil and water mix, and subject all those previously unaffected organisms to the oil.”
Not only that, adding dispersant increases oil’s toxicity. “Chemically dispersed oil is 100 to 1,000 times more toxic than undispersed oil, primarily because the dispersant distributes the oil throughout the water column so that the toxic constituents can more easily partition from tiny oil droplets to water and into fish and other species,” says Hodson. “The actual concentration of oil and PAH causing toxicity remains the same, but the bioavailability of PAH is much higher than for undispersed oil."
Marine ecologist Benjamin Pister explains it this way, “Some people make the mistake of saying dispersants make the oil go away. It doesn’t go away, it just goes somewhere else — out of sight, out of mind, as you say.” Another grave concern for those animals that don’t die but suffer sublethal effects is bioaccumulation, which happened in the 1970s with the pesticide DDT. “The top predators are going to eat a lot of little things that maybe have a little bit of contamination in them. But the more they eat, those little bits turn into a big bit of contamination. This contamination will last for decades.”
The EPA switched their tune, and on May 20, they gave BP 24 hours to find a less toxic alternative. BP refused. Some reporters have pointed out the connection between Corexit and Goldman Sachs. Who is profiting from this spill?
So what now? All this gloom-and-doom gets depressing.
I’ve chosen to focus this new monthly blog, The Wendee Holtcamp Report, on the positive side of climate change. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing cheery about melting ice caps, species decline, disappearing habitat, desertification, global warming deniers, pollution, or companies skirting their responsibilities. But in future blogs, I will seek out and highlight shining stars: individuals, organizations, and governments around the world taking action to combat climate change in their communities. I will talk about cutting-edge research on climate change solutions, and some interesting scientific research projects covering the present and potential future impacts of warming temperatures on flora, fauna and ecosystems.
An idiom for transformation, the term ‘sea change’ hails from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Anyone concerned about climate change should realize that the Gulf disaster can yet serve as a beacon. It sends a clear message to anyone paying attention as to why finite, non-renewable — not to mention dirty — energy sources such as oil must yield to clean, sustainable, renewable energy sources — sun, wind, waves, motion if we want to leave the next generation anything remotely resembling the Planet Earth it once was. And let’s not forget our own complicity as we wastefully use plastic and drive gas guzzlers.
Middelgrunden is an offshore wind farm in the Øresund 3.5 km outside Copenhagen, Denmark. When it was built in 2000, it was the world’s largest offshore farm, with 20 turbines and a capacity of 40 MW. The farm delivers about 4% of the power for Copenhagen.
A sea change doesn’t happen overnight, but shame on us all if it should become just another environmental Armageddon whose lessons we forget as soon as headlines focus on other subjects. Did anyone notice the irony of the rig sinking on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day? Forgive my sentimentality for a moment, but if we forget so quickly, all those unsuspecting, helpless marine organisms that never had a chance to live, breed, pass on their genes and ultimately evolve — will simply have died in vain. And let’s not forget the eleven rig workers who lost their lives.
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Photo Credits: Deepwater Horizon Response (2) | Richard Bartz and Kim Hansen Video Credit: Deepwater Horizon Response |
April 30, 2010 — How about you come on down to Lews-ee-ana in September to celebrate the state’s 75th annual Shrimp & Petroleum Festival? As their website says, “This is an event that will prove that oil and water really do mix.” Ahem. We’re about to see just how well.
This year, the aptly named festival will have a distinctly different tone: Shrimpers filed a class-action lawsuit against those responsible for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill 50 miles off the Louisiana coast (BP, Transocean, Halliburton, among others). The spill threatens shrimpers’ livelihood as the oil snakes its way towards ecologically fragile barrier islands and coastline that provide nursing grounds for young shrimp.
The Transocean-owned rig, leased by petroleum giant BP, exploded in flames on April 20, sinking into the ocean on April 22. When the rig sunk, it snapped a pipe, which now gushes approximately 5,000 barrels (or 210,000 gallons) of crude oil every day since into the Gulf, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. The rig actually has three total leaks, and attempts to cap the subsea well using a robot have proven unsuccessful. As of Thursday, the slick covered a circumference of 600 miles.
What was initially dismissed as a minor controllable spill is now called potentially as catastrophic — or more so — than the Exxon Valdez, which at 11 million gallons is America’s largest oil spill ever. If they don’t cap the well, it will take just 52 days to release as much oil as the Valdez. If the Montara rig explosion off Western Australia is any example, it’s not an unlikely scenario. That rig erupted in flame in August 2009 and spilled up to 2,000 barrels per day until November. Attempts to cap the leak failed time and again, and creating another well to alleviate pressure takes months.
Image courtesy of NOAA
Out in the Gulf, frantic cleanup crews have conducted limited burns to remove oil, have sprayed chemical dispersants to break it up (itself not so great from an environmental perspective), and have attempted to use an undersea dome to contain the mess, but nevertheless, as of last night, oil has just begun to reach shore. “Booms” — long floating absorbent ‘noodles’ — have been deployed to protect coastal wetlands, but from recent experience from the January 2010 Eagle Otome tanker crash near Port Arthur, Texas, booms never work perfectly, and may fail to get placed in critical regions due to human communication errors.
So what impacts might the BP rig spill have on marine life? NOAA reported that several endangered sperm whales have surfaced amidst the oil. The Gulf has 29 species of marine mammals, all protected, as well as six threatened or endangered sea turtle species. Most large marine critters can swim away, but toxins in the oil, in the dispersants used, and fumes from the fires used to burn it off could cause wildlife deaths, health issues and cancers for months and years to come.
View of spill from space Image courtesy of NOAA
But the worst problems for fisheries and wildlife – and the associated commercial and recreational industries — will arise when oil hits the estuaries and wetlands on the shore. Oysters, snapper, speckled trout, grouper, and of course shrimp, live in or breed in near-shore estuaries, which are a delicate mix of salt and freshwater. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), commercial fisheries in the five Gulf States is a $661 million industry, annually. Three-fourths of wild shrimp harvested in the U.S. come from here (though shrimp-trawling overall is a very wasteful fishery), and the estuaries also provide breeding grounds for rare and declining Atlantic bluefin tuna.
I’ve read media reports that offshore rigs still have a stellar safety record, but does that account for the small and medium size spills from ships transporting the oil, which get very little media play? I’ve reported no less than three spills in the past several months -one off San Fran, the Montara rig explosion off Australia, and the Eagle Otome close to my own home in Houston. In January of this year, a tanker destined for the ExxonMobil refinery crashed into a tow-boat, spilling 462,000 gallons of oil off of Port Arthur, Texas, affecting fragile coastal marshes.
The Obama administration has pledged to respond swiftly to the emergency, and has sent Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to address the spill. The White House declared the spill “of national significance,” which helps ease the transfer of federal funds and assistance to state and local officials.
According to the Minerals Management Service, offshore drilling produces 1/4 of U.S. domestic oil production, and the Department of Energy report states that all offshore areas of the U.S. contain only a grand total of 76 billion barrels of conventionally recoverable oil, with 36.9 billion of that in the Gulf. President Obama has publicly endorsed opening more coastline to expanded offshore drilling, and it remains to be seen whether he will reconsider his plan to expand offshore drilling in the wake of the tragedy. Today, he announced all new offshore projects are on hold until officials determine the cause of the rig explosion that left 11 dead and millions of gallons still pumping into the sea, and just starting to reach the shore. I’ll report more on wildlife impacts in a few days.
The buzz on Twitter is that suddenly those controversial offshore wind farms don’t seem so ugly.
A welder fabricates a pollution containment chamber. This chamber, which should have been built 
A pelican swims in a make-shift pool after being cleaned of oil. More harmful effects may be 
Middelgrunden is an offshore wind farm in the Øresund 3.5 km outside Copenhagen, Denmark. 
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