Effect Of Bp Oil Spill On Environment – New Orleans, Louisiana On April 20, 2010, an explosion at the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig released more than 130 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the largest Oil Spill in US waters and remains one of the worst environmental disasters in world history.
Eleven rig workers lost their lives. As well as millions of marine mammals, sea turtles, birds, and fish. While the world watched, helpless, oil gushed into one of the most biodiverse marine habitats of the planet for 87 long days.
Effect Of Bp Oil Spill On Environment
A decade later, many species, such as deep sea coral, common loons, and spotted sea trout, are still struggling, their population is lower than before. On the other hand, some inhabitants of the Gulf have shown a steady recovery – among them, the menhaden fish and the brown pelican, Louisiana’s state bird. (Read how the Gulf oil Spill has harmed dolphins and turtles.)
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
Scientists say it is too early to say for sure what the impact will be on longer-lived species such as dolphins, whales and sea turtles.
A loggerhead sea turtle eats an oil-polluted Portuguese man-of-war in the Gulf of Mexico on May 5, 2010.
Even so, “based on our science so far, if you’re a marine mammal living in the Gulf at the time of the spill, it’s not looking good for you,” said Cynthia Smith, a veterinarian at the National Marine Mammal Foundation. . “The unborn animal, that’s the hope,” said Smith, a marine mammal expert who traveled to the spill.
Smith was one of many scientists whose careers pivoted after this event. Funds from the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative-and more recently, a $16 billion settlement between BP and the US federal and state governments-have enabled a legion of researchers to conduct long-term projects investigating how the spill affected Gulf wildlife.
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Many species have been difficult to study. But after a decade of close monitoring, Smith feels he and his colleagues have a clear picture of what’s going on with the most gregarious of cetaceans, the bottlenose dolphin — and it’s terrifying.
About a thousand dolphins died in the months following the spill, after they ingested toxins from the oil. Many others appear to have fallen ill since then. (Read about the death of a baby dolphin in the Gulf.)
The latest study, not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, revealed that only 20 percent of pregnancies among dolphins in Louisiana’s oil-rich Barataria Bay are successful, compared with 83 percent in unoiled areas. This number remains unchanged from 2015 findings.
Ten years out, Smith also saw high rates of reproductive failure, lung disease, heart problems, impaired stress response, and death in bottlenose dolphins.
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Interestingly, Smith said, these symptoms mirror the most common health problem faced by another large mammal exposed to oil spills: humans. Two recent studies, both published in 2018, found impaired lung and heart function and impaired breathing, respectively, among cleanup workers and US Coast Guard personnel who had contact with the oil.
“You don’t necessarily think of the dolphin as a representative of yourself or a human representative of the dolphin, but our lives overlap,” Smith said. “We’re in this room together, and there’s a lot to learn from it.”
Kaitlin Frasier remembers the day in 2010 that her Ph.D. The adviser told him he thought he should focus his career on the recent Deepwater Horizon spill.
At the time, Frasier, couldn’t imagine where the journey would take him. Now, he is an assistant project scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and has spent the past decade listening for signs of life in the Gulf—namely, the clicks and clacks of echolocating marine mammals.
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“We can’t see the ocean floor, so we don’t know how [the oil] affects the whales,” Frasier said. It is difficult to say, he said, whether the oil from the sediments is reduced back into the water and affects the food of the cetaceans. (This is why the “shocking” amount of oil fell to the seabed.)
Underwater corals in the Gulf of Mexico, like these bubblegum and bamboo corals, were studied well before the spill, giving scientists a better idea of how the oil harmed them.
The Gulf of Mexico is home to 21 species of marine mammals, most of which humans rarely see—so scientists need to listen. The sounds these animals emit can reveal which species are still active years after a spill, and which have declined.
“It’s a surprise in some ways,” Frasier said, “because they’re so common. Visual observers call them rats because they’re crawling all over the Gulf. And now, we’re just finding fewer of them in our acoustic data.
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For many species, the results are unclear. In part, that’s because scientists knew little about the behavior of many underwater marine mammals before the spill, so have trouble detecting changes from current data.
Take the little-studied dwarf sperm whale: It is not clear how to interpret the short, high-pitched clicking sound of Frasier can be associated with them now. Likewise, sperm whales, which emit long, low-frequency clicks, have not been detected recently near the spill site, but this can only mean they have moved.
Marine mammals are an important indicator of the health of the entire ocean, so studying them can tell scientists a great deal about their environment.
“We have all these pieces of the puzzle, but it’s hard to know how they fit together,” Frasier said.
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Kemp’s ridley sea turtle digs a nest on the beach in Rancho Nuevo, Mexico. These spills appear to be hindering the recovery of critically endangered species.
Peter Etnoyer, a marine biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Hollings Lab, studies deep-sea corals. Some were thriving near the Deepwater Horizon well before the spill, according to seabed surveys. After the spill, scientists found that half of the coral colony—colorful, fan-shaped creatures called octocoral gorgonians—surveyed had been injured.
“We don’t know how long it will take this coral colony to recover,” Etnoyer said. “It’s growing very, very slowly. What we’ve found is that the damage is on the order of decades to hundreds of years. (Learn how the Gulf oil spill is even bigger than we thought.)
Coral is an important habitat for species such as shrimp, crab, grouper, and snapper. And because they show growth rings like trees, corals act as “little environmental monitors, recording conditions over time,” says Etnoyer.
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Now, his team is preparing for future disasters, mapping deep-sea corals and developing a coral database with more than 750,000 records so far. The team also has a seven-year plan to help coral rebound, which includes traveling to the seafloor using divers or remotely operated vehicles and cloning or transplanting several hundred corals from one point to another.
“It will be the first time ever that this particular coral transplant has been attempted on an industrial scale,” he said.
The Gulf of Mexico is home to five species of sea turtles, all of which are protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Leatherbacks and Atlantic hawksbills roam the offshore waters, while loggerhead, green, and ridley Kemp’s sea turtles often inhabit nearshore habitats. A 2017 study estimated that at least 402,000 sea turtles were exposed to oil during the spill, 51 percent of which were Kemp’s ridleys, the smallest and most critically endangered species.
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Before the spill, Kemp’s ridley population was projected to grow at a rate of 19 percent per year. By contrast, the number of nests on Gulf beaches — the species’ main nesting location — dropped 35 percent between 2009 and 2010, and dropped again in 2013, according to a 2016 study. The study also showed that Kemp’s ridley females have struggled to maintain the weight and health needed to reproduce. .
A new version of the federal recovery plan for Ridley Kemp was signed in 2014 in response to the spill. The move led to new protections for nesting beaches in Texas and Mexico, and a requirement that shrimp fisheries in the Gulf use excluder devices to prevent the reptiles from being caught in trawls.
Birds were among the hardest-hit animals immediately after the flooding, said Erik Johnson, director of bird conservation for Audubon Louisiana.
“We know that the number of birds affected is between 100,000 and a million. Unfortunately, we will never know the exact number,” he said. (See photos of birds and other wildlife covered in oil.)
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Those stats include common loons, northern gannets, double-crested cormorants, royal terns, Wilson’s plovers, black skimmers, and seaside sparrows, to name a few. also affected: up to 32 percent of laughing gulls and up to a quarter of all brown pelicans. (Learn how nature can bounce back from oil spills.)
Many birds that are not directly killed by oil coating their feathers have shown increased rates of oil-related cancer, reproductive problems, and a reduced ability to regulate their body temperature due to feather damage, according to a 2020 study.
But just as all the birds are the most devastated, in some cases they will probably show some strong recovery. The settlement money was used to restore Louisiana’s Queen Bess Island
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