The Never-ending History of Life on a Rock

The boulder nicknamed “Mearns Rock,” located in the southwest corner of Prince William Sound, Alaska, was coated in oil which was not cleaned off after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. This image was taken in 2003. (NOAA)

In 1989 when Dr. Alan Mearns first caught sight of a certain seaweed-encrusted boulder in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, he had little idea he would be visiting that chest-high, relatively nondescript rock year after year … for the next two decades. Or that, along the way, the boulder would eventually bear his name: Mearns Rock.

This particular rock—like many others in the southwest corner of the sound—was coated in oil after the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on nearby Bligh Reef and flooded the salty waters with nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil in March 1989. For the next ten years, Mearns and other NOAA biologists examined how marine life in these tidal areas reacted to the Exxon oiling. Some of the rocky areas in their study had been oiled; others had later been cleaned of oil using high-pressure, hot-water hoses, while still others, serving as a “control” or baseline comparison, had been untouched by oil or cleaning efforts—as if the Exxon Valdez had never disemboweled its oily innards at all.

Looking Under a Rock

Over the years, Mearns and his fellow biologists were able to observe [PDF] the many faces of “normal” for this intertidal ecosystem—a dynamic habitat on the edge of land and sea and exposed to the rigors of both. In doing so, they and other scientists found that this ecosystem showed signs of recovery from oiling after about three or four years [PDF].

When the ten-year monitoring study ended, the NOAA team shifted to a smaller-scale, experimental phase of research that continues today. As part of this field-based research, Mearns (or occasionally one of his colleagues) still returns to Mearns Rock and up to eight other rocky sites to record an annual snapshot of the ecological processes there. He has observed the ebb and flow of the mussels, barnacles, and various seaweeds populating these boulders, which are set on sections of beach alternately flooded and drained by the Pacific Ocean’s tides.

Photographic Memory

The NOAA-led study team observes Mearns Rock (left of center) in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on June 5, 2012. (NOAA)

This collection of annual snapshots adds up to an ecological photo-journal of sorts, while also serving as a much less labor-intensive method of research. By taking the same photograph around the same time each year, Mearns is able to examine and compare the general year-to-year variability of the plants and animals living on Mearns Rock. You can see the progression of these annual changes occurring on Mearns Rock in a photo slideshow.

But 24 years into this experiment, Mearns decided it was time for this kind of enduring, localized scientific observation to take on new energy. In January 2012 at the annual Alaska Marine Science Symposium in Anchorage, Alaska, he and Office of Response and Restoration colleague John Whitney presented a poster describing the decades of environmental trends at Mearns Rock.

The two hoped to garner the attention of others interested in turning this annual photo-surveillance of Mearns Rock and the other boulders from the original study—nine in all—into a volunteer-led project.

“It worked,” Mearns reported. “Scientists and students stopped by to chat. At one point a half dozen of us gathered at the poster and several offered to visit sites in the summer of 2012.”

But science requires consistency: everything needs to be done the exact same way. Mearns pulled together a reference guide for these volunteers, which would direct them to the study sites; tell them precisely where, when, and how to take photos at each location; and provide samples of past photos for comparison.

Passing the Torch

The locations of intertidal boulders in Dr. Alan Mearns’ study in southwest Prince William Sound, Alaska. The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in the northeast corner of the sound (not on map). Key: Yellow sites were oiled and cleaned with high pressure, hot-water washing in 1989. Green sites were oiled but not cleaned in 1989. Blue sites were not oiled in the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Inset: Relative location of Prince William Sound. Click to enlarge.

On an exceptionally clear and calm morning this past June, Mearns, other NOAA scientists, and a couple Coast Guard staff cruised across the waters of Prince William Sound aboard a 30-foot charter vessel. They visited three different locations around the sound, including Mearns Rock.

But unlike in the past, the crew wasn’t alone in their efforts. Mearns and Whitney had successfully recruited volunteers to help photograph the other six study areas in the sound.

In fact, the first volunteer, David Janka, skipper of Auklet Charters in Cordova, Alaska, had already taken photos the month before at three NOAA sampling sites on the northern end of Knight Island, which was heavily oiled during the Exxon Valdez spill. Janka was no stranger to this project; he had taken the annual snapshot of Mearns Rock several times in the past when Mearns was unable to venture out there himself.

First for Mearns and his crew on that June day, however, was stopping at an unoiled rocky site at Eshamy Bay Lodge, near Whittier, Alaska. It had been several years since their team had been able to photograph a site that had escaped the Exxon oiling, and Mearns was anxious to re-establish this one. While there, they worked on recruiting the manager of the nearby lodge to photograph that boulder in the future. Afterwards, they sped off to a second study site and finally to Snug Harbor, location of Mearns Rock.

A few weeks later, Dr. Thomas Dean, a marine biologist from San Diego working in Prince William Sound, joined the effort and, using Mearns’ reference guide, was able to photograph the seventh site, one on Knight Island’s Herring Bay. With only two study sites left to visit in 2012, Dr. Rob Campbell of the Prince William Sound Science Center pitched in to check off the eighth site. While out doing herring surveys, he stopped by the study site in Shelter Bay long enough to snap photos of two boulders the NOAA team had nicknamed “Bert” and “Ernie.”

Finally, thanks to a tip from Dr. Campbell, Mearns reached out to Kate McLaughlin, a scientist and educator living in Chenega Bay, a Native village only a mile from the untouched Crab Bay control site on Evans Island. She happily agreed to help, and in July, she and her dog made a couple trips to that corner of Prince William Sound to secure the last photos.

An Unexpected Legacy

Yet Mearns and his research have managed to inspire an even larger effort which would expand on this type of coastal monitoring in Alaska. John Harper at Coastal and Ocean Resources, Inc. in Victoria, British Columbia, is leading an initiative to engage citizen scientists around the Gulf of Alaska.

One of the goals of this initiative, known as the Three Amigos Intertidal Sampling Program, is “to collect information on the condition of rocky intertidal communities and changes that occur over time.” Supported by the Oil Spill Recovery Institute, Harper and his colleagues in this endeavor are developing a protocol and model for community-based environmental monitoring and admitted that their proposed approach for this program is inspired directly by Mearns Rock—an exciting legacy for an otherwise average boulder patiently setting at the ocean’s edge, year after year.

Dr. Alan Mearns contributed to this blog post.

Do Bigger Oil Spills Require More Restoration?

This is a post by NOAA intern Franziska Economy.

Quick, can you name ten major oil spills?

Having a hard time? Until recently, I would have been scratching my head after:

1. Deepwater Horizon/BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010)
2. Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Alaska (1989)
3. … ?

Maybe some of you managed to come up with a couple of the other major spills from the last few decades, but this seems to be a tall order for the average person.

Oil spills actually happen just about every day, but most don’t make the news. I was surprised to learn that there are nearly 14,000 oil and chemical spills reported to the National Response Center every year.

Even crazier to me was the discovery that sometimes the best recovery option for small oil spills is actually taking “No Action.” This can be the case when cleaning up the oil would cause more harm to a sensitive ecosystem than just leaving it there to break down naturally. Sometimes, however, an oil spill can be relatively large and present real dangers to the plants and animals in the area without attracting much attention from the greater public.

Learning all of this prompted me to delve into the treasure trove of information on the oil spill cases NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration handles. As the lead science agency for oil spills, NOAA is asked to respond to about 100–200 of the more significant marine and coastal spills every year to provide scientific support to help with the cleanup. A much smaller subset of those spills require a legal assessment of environmental monetary damages to restore those natural resources. This is known as a Natural Resource Damage Assessment or NRDA.

When studying these NRDA spill cases, I focused on two particularly interesting factors: the size of the oil spill and the “restoration cost,” or how much money the oil spiller has to pay to restore the public’s injured natural resources. Take a look at the top ten oil spill cases in each category and see how they compare:

Figure 1. The top ten NOAA oil spill NRDA settlements by dollar amount needed to restore injured environmental resources. Note: each color in this graph corresponds to a spill found on both Figure 1 and Figure 2; gray spills are only found on one graph. Source: http://www.darrp.noaa.gov/ Click to enlarge.

Figure 2. The top ten NOAA oil spill NRDA settlements by the volume of oil spilled in gallons. Source: http://www.darrp.noaa.gov/ Click to enlarge.

Right off the bat, it is easy to spot that bigger oil spills don’t always result in the highest restoration costs, and even if the restoration cost of a spill is relatively high, it is not necessarily related to the size of the spill. The Cosco Busan and Athos place first and second among oil spill settlements by restoration cost (Figure 1), but they are not big enough to land in the top ten by spill size (Figure 2; they are 12 and 23, respectively).

Furthermore, before the Deepwater Horizon/BP incident, the spill Barge Morris J. Berman was the largest spill that OR&R had responded to; yet it ranked only the fifth highest among restoration settlements, not even one-third the amount of the highest settlement, the Cosco Busan. In general, only half of the spills on each graph appear on the other, showing a lower correlation between these two variables than I originally thought.

So, why do you think that is? I’ve been brainstorming what factors could influence why gallons of oil spilled do not necessarily result in the most money required to restore natural resources. A single variable—such as the amount or type of oil spilled—isn’t by itself an accurate indicator of how much money it takes to respond to, clean up, and restore the environment after an oil spill. We have to examine a variety of factors to understand the bigger picture.

Other factors which might affect the restoration cost of an oil spill include:

• the properties of the oil spilled (was it thick like tar that would sink to the bottom? Or was it light and likely to evaporate quickly from the water’s surface?)
• the type and effectiveness of cleanup methods (was very little oil able to be recovered?)
• the type of ecosystem affected (was it an estuary full of sensitive marsh grass and bird nesting sites or in an lower quality industrial area with a bulkheaded shoreline?)
• the cultural and economic values of nearby cities and towns (was the spill close to a population with strong ties to the outdoor environment?)

What other issues do you think might play a role in how much restoration is required to offset the impacts of an oil spill on the environment?

Franziska Economy is an American University graduate with a Bachelors of Arts in Economics and Environmental Science. She is working as a Constituent and Legislative Affairs intern for NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration and enjoys sharing the interesting facts she has learned and statistics she has uncovered. She hopes to help break down the acronym-filled, complicated world of responding to oil spills, assessing damages, and restoring broken ecosystems.

What Happens After Abandoning Ship

Twenty three years after running aground on a reef in Alaska and causing one of the largest spills in U.S. history, the tanker Exxon Valdez is back in the news—this time to keep it from being intentionally grounded on a beach in India.

The Indian Supreme Court has ruled that the Exxon Valdez (now called the Oriental Nicety) cannot be grounded and cut apart on the shores of Gujarat until it can be cleaned of residual oils and other contaminants.

Workers scrap ships for parts and metal (“ship breaking”) on a beach in Bhatiari, Chittagong, Bangladesh. Credit: Naquib Hossain, Creative Commons License: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0).

What’s known as “ship breaking” is a dirty business, and many of the world’s tired and obsolete vessels end up being grounded on beaches in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan and cut apart for scrap steel.

In recent years the business of ship scrapping has become a major health and environmental concern. Many ship breaking yards in these developing countries have little or no safety equipment or environmental protections, and toxic materials from these ships, including oils, heavy metals, and asbestos, escape into the environment.

A rusted-out derelict vessel still sits grounded on a coal reef in Samoa. (NOAA/Doug Helton)

Obsolete vessels and ship scrapping can also be a problem here in the U.S. Last year, the 431-foot S/S Davy Crockett made the news down on the Columbia River near Vancouver, Wash.

Mysterious oil sheens on the river were traced upriver to the former Navy Liberty ship that had begun leaking oil due to improper and unpermitted salvage operations.

Next week I will be at the Clean Pacific Conference in Long Beach, Calif., and presenting information on the challenges of dealing with abandoned and derelict vessels in the U.S. I know that the Davy Crockett and the issues it raised will come up.

Vessels are abandoned for all sorts of reasons, including storms (particularly hurricanes/typhoons which may damage large numbers of boats), community-wide economic stress or change (e.g., declining commercial fishing industries), and financial or legal issues of individual owners.  The high cost of proper vessel disposal can lead some folks to just walk away.

Hopefully we can help improve how we respond to these vessels and increase prevention programs to prevent abandonment. If you are interested in this issue, there is more information on NOAA’s Abandoned Vessel Program.

100 Years After the Titanic and the Dangers of Icy Seas

All links leave this blog.

One of the greatest marine accidents of the 20^th century involved an ocean liner hitting an iceberg. The 100^th anniversary of the Titanic sinking is April 15, and I always cringe when I think of the crew trying and failing to turn the massive, 883 foot-long ship just before hitting the iceberg.

I know how long it can take to turn and stop a large vessel (sometimes as many as 5 miles). But did you know that another great maritime accident of the 20^th century came from a ship changing course to avoid ice?

On March 24, 1989, the tanker Exxon Valdez left its namesake port in Alaska, loaded with 53 million gallons of North Slope crude oil bound for Long Beach, Calif. Most people know that hours later the Exxon Valdez grounded at Bligh Reef, spilling some 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound.

Just before midnight, Captain Joe Hazelwood called the Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Center on the radio and said he was changing course and diverting from the designated traffic lanes. But the Exxon Valdez wasn’t just taking a short cut across the Sound. The Captain intentionally turned the ship to “wind my way through the ice.”

The Columbia Glacier is about 30 miles from the port town of Valdez, Alaska, and some of the ice that breaks off the glacier floats out into the shipping lanes.

The traffic center acknowledged and confirmed the Exxon Valdez’s new course. A few minutes later the Exxon Valdez made another course change, but this one was was not reported to the Valdez traffic center. Twenty minutes later the Exxon Valdez ran aground. A lengthy analysis of the events leading up to the grounding can be found at the Exxon Valdez Trustee Council website.

Sea ice consists of frozen sea water and is observed in terms of three basic parameters: concentration, stage of development, and form. (NOAA)

Because of the hazard ice poses to shipping, my NOAA office prepared a booklet guide to sea ice [PDF] to make it easier for captains and pilots to report and share information about ice conditions at sea.

Sea ice comes in a lot of forms and sizes and has some colorful names like “brash” and “growler” and “cake” and “bergy bits.” I think the one that the Titanic hit would be called a “large berg,” which can range in size from 401 to 670 feet.

You can find out more information about the Titanic and NOAA’s role in discovering, studying, and protecting the site of this historic shipwreck, now a tragic symbol of the dangers of ice at sea.

More Than Two Decades Later, Have Killer Whales Recovered from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill?

With input from NOAA’s Alan Mearns, Gary Shigenaka, and Marilyn Dahlheim. All links leave this blog.

Killer whale breaching (NOAA Marine Operations Center).

Does a killer whale instinctively know how to avoid oil spilled on the surface of its watery home? At the time of the Exxon Valdez oil spill twenty-three years ago, scientists and oil spill experts presumed that the answer was “yes.”

They thought marine mammals were “smart” enough to steer clear of spilled oil, which possibly could harm their skin and eyes or irritate their lungs with hazardous vapors.

Yet, within 24 hours of the tanker Exxon Valdez grounding on Bligh Reef, killer whales were photographed swimming through iridescent slicks of oil in Prince William Sound, Alaska. No one was quite sure then how this exposure to oil might affect the health of killer whales living there. For most oil spills, we don’t know how well individual species were faring before oil invaded their habitats, complicating our ability to understand health impacts after a spill. This time, however, was different.

“Orcas (killer whales) have been particularly interesting because they have been so well studied and are one of the few critters for which pre-spill information was available,” NOAA biologist Gary Shigenaka says of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, which he has worked on extensively.

The two killer whale pods unlucky enough to swim in or near Exxon oil were from two different eco-types of killer whales, known as “resident” and “transient.”  Eco-types differ in several aspects of morphology (shape and structure), ecology, behavior, and genetics.  For example, resident whales primarily feed on fish while transient killer whales feed on marine mammals.

Since the 1989 oil spill, scientists have followed closely the killer whale populations of Southeast Alaska. They have examined both the two pods of whales exposed to the oil in Prince William Sound as well as the other resident and transient pods which were not in the oiled areas at the time. The differences are stark.

Killer whales swimming in Prince William Sound alongside boats skimming oil from the Exxon Valdez oil spill (State of Alaska, Dan Lawn).

In the year and a half after the Exxon Valdez spill, both groups of killer whales swimming through Prince William Sound at the time experienced an unprecedented high number of deaths. The pod of resident killer whales lost 33% and the pod of transients 41% of their populations, according to a 2008 study by researcher Craig Matkin [PDF]. In general, killer whales tend to have very stable populations, usually losing only very young or very old whales when they lose any.

But in this case, the pods were losing a number of immature whales and breeding females as well. Missing these key members, the populations in the oiled areas were slow to bounce back, if they bounced at all. One pod of resident killer whales still hasn’t reached its pre-spill numbers, while the oil-exposed transient pod’s numbers have dropped so much that NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service has listed them as a “depleted stock” under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Meanwhile, the other killer whale populations in Southeast Alaska have been growing since the mid-1980s.

Population trends in killer whales before and after the Exxon Valdez oil spill: AB Pod is the group of resident whales while AT1 is the transient group exposed to oil in Prince William Sound. Courtesy of Craig Matkin.

Still, because researchers were unable to examine either live or most of the dead whales after the spill (and thus confirm oil-related injuries), any direct link between the spill and killer whale health has been circumstantial. Even so, Shigenaka personally believes that this indirect evidence “stands the test of time.”

The crux of it lies in the fact that two pods of very different killer whale groups crashed suddenly and simultaneously after only one obvious disturbance to their environment—the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Fast forward twenty-one years to April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. Taking these lessons about killer whales and oil from the Exxon Valdez, NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration quickly partnered up with the NOAA Fisheries Service to do reconnaissance during the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill, especially in oiled areas. Twenty-one species of marine mammals live in the Gulf, and bottlenose dolphins in particular potentially could be suffering some significant impacts from this spill.

Since February 2010 (before the oil spill), nearly 700 bottlenose dolphins and other species of cetaceans (dolphins and whales) in the Northern Gulf of Mexico have been stranded. These marine mammals are experiencing what’s known as an “unusual mortality event,” defined as “a stranding that is unexpected, involves a significant die-off of any marine mammal population, and demands immediate response.” Federal and state agencies have been investigating this large die-off and any possible connections to its overlap with the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill.

These investigations are ongoing and the possible role of infection in these dolphins adds a twist that leaves us with plenty of questions still to answer. Nevertheless, every piece of information we learn helps create a fuller picture of how oil spills affect marine mammals, whether we’re looking at killer whales in Prince William Sound or bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico.

For more information on killer whales and the Exxon Valdez oil spill, check out:

Matkin, C.O., Saulitis, E.L., Ellis, G.M., Olesiuk, P., Rice, S.D. 2008. Ongoing population-level impacts on killer whales Orcinus orca following the ‘Exxon Valdez’ oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 356:269-281.

Loughlin, T. R. Ed. Marine Mammals and the Exxon Valdez. Academic Press, San Diego, 1994.

At the End of the Trans Alaska Pipeline

The southern terminus of the Trans Alaska Pipeline ends somewhat anticlimactically here at mile 800. Credit: Doug Helton, NOAA.

The southern end of the 800 mile-long Trans Alaska Pipeline sits in the stunning natural background of Valdez, Alaska. The Valdez Marine Terminal is where crude oil from the North Slope is loaded on tankers destined for refineries on the west coast of the U.S.

Last week I arrived in Valdez for a meeting with the Alaska Regional Response Team. Working for NOAA, I represent the Department of Commerce in the multi-agency team that coordinates planning and preparedness activities for oil spills in Alaskan waters. The flight here from Anchorage crosses the heavily glaciated Chugach Mountains before descending into Prince William Sound. Icebergs from the calving glaciers dot the waters of the sound, and dozens of small fishing boats were chasing the late salmon runs into Port Valdez.

Chunks of ice fall off of a glacier in the Chugach Mountains en route to Valdez, Alaska. Credit: Doug Helton, NOAA.

I had a chance to tour the pipeline terminal during my visit to Valdez, and the first thing I noticed was the smell — not the smell of oil, but the smell of spawned-out salmon that cover the tide flats near the terminal. And the sounds of thousands of gulls feeding on the dead salmon. Two black bears chased a few late spawners in the creek near the terminal.

A black bear and gulls feed on recently spawned salmon near Valdez, Alaska. Credit: Doug Helton, NOAA.

But the natural beauty of Valdez is often overshadowed in the public’s mind because of the town’s most famous namesake. The tanker Exxon Valdez left the marine terminal on the evening of March 23, 1989, and a few minutes after midnight on March 24, it ran aground and spilled millions of gallons of crude oil into the clear, cold waters of Prince William Sound.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill [leaves this blog] became a poster child for technological disasters and set in motion laws and regulations that fundamentally changed how we handle oil pollution in the United States. Valdez (or Prince William Sound) is really the cradle of modern spill response in the U.S., and  22 years later, my visit to Valdez helped continue that effort to improve how we respond to spills.

While the amount of oil flowing through the pipeline has diminished over the years, and tanker calls are less frequent, the pipeline still transports about 500,000 barrels (21 million gallons) a day into the big storage tanks that overlook the harbor. The Valdez Marine Terminal is still very much on the front lines in both oil spill prevention and response.