Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Talks

This is the Plenary talk from a symposium on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in Denver, Colorado in March 2011. The Deepwater Horizon oil release of 2010 presented a mixture of unique and familiar environmental challenges to marine scientists, government and industry responders, and policymakers. Intensive dispersant application at the wellhead 5000 m below the surface and on the surface introduced chemicals that helped create an oil-dispersant mix of toxicants at depth, while reducing the mass of floating mousse. This decision was a trade-off, limiting the amounts of floating oil transported to the beach over the first five months following the blow-out, and thereby affording some protection to sensitive coastal organism and communities, including marshes where persistence can extend for decades, at the expense of unknown chronic impacts on pelagic organisms and communities out of sight beneath the sea surface. The floating oil remaining on the sea surface has oiled several shorelines and killed seabirds. Government trustees for natural resources have developed multiple Technical Working Groups focused on separate aspects of potential natural resource injury caused by the familiar spill – floating oil – but as yet have failed to integrate these studies under a conceptual ecosystem model that could guide injury assessment arising from linkages among species and habitats. The unfamiliar spill of subsurface pelagic oil at depth presents huge challenges to science, which can offer no historical guidance to risk of injury from chronic exposures to small dispersed oil droplets and is largely unprepared to track dispersions at depth and document injuries. Unwelcome surprises may lie ahead as stealth transport of subsurface oil leads it too close to shore. Targeted advances in deep-water pelagic environmental science are critically needed to keep pace with engineering developments that open new depths to risks of spilled oil.

National Center for Atmospheric Research surface dye model predicting worse case scenario if surface oil makes into into a strong Loop Current. This helped incorrectly focus attention on surface waters.