Due to changes in the drilling industry, oil spills are impacting large expanses of coastlines, thereby increasing the potential for people to come in contact with oil spill chemicals. The objective of this manuscript was to evaluate the health risk to children who potentially contact beach sands impacted by oil spill chemicals from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. To identify chemicals of conce...

the degradation of crude oil under a no-control and dispersant-control setting was evaluated using loss of biological activity test, microbial population growth and measurements of optical transmittance of test media. comparison of the toxicity of crude oil under the no-control setting to crude oil-dispersant mixture revealed that the mixture was about 2 times more toxic than the crude oil unde...

the present study reports the changes in the phytoplankton community structure in taklong island national marine reserve (tinmar), guimaras island, philippines. quantification of pah yielded undetectable results, whereas, primary productivity, phytoplankton density, and diversity values were higher as compared to samples before the oil spill and samples from the reference site. sixty-nine gener...

The biota in the Arabian Gulf faces stress both from natural (i.e., hyper salinity and high sea surface temperature), and human (i.e., from oil-related activities) sources. The western Arabian Gulf was also impacted by world’s largest oil spill (1991 Oil Spill). However, benthic research in this region is scarce and most of the studies have been conducted only in small areas. Here, we present d...

Using the constituent elements of vulnerability, an evaluation index system for the ecological vulnerability of coastal areas under oil spill stress is established based on “Sensitivity–Adaptive Capacity-Exposure”. After selecting a gulf in China as the main case study in this work, the cluster analysis and reference method were applied in grading and value assigning for all indexes. In additio...

Pristane (2,6,10,14-tetramethylpentadecane) concentrations in mussels (Mytilus trossulus) increase abruptly during spring in Prince William Sound (PWS), Alaska. This increase is mainly due to ingestion by mussels of pristane-laden feces produced by near-shore zooplanktivores, especially juvenile pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha). Examination of the trophic and temporal distribution of prista...

This project investigated population status, habitat use and trophic interactions of harbor seals in Prince William Sound (PWS), Alaska. Aerial counts to monitor population trend indicated a 3.3% annual decline during 1990-1999. Counts were 20% lower in 1999 than in 1990, and >50% lower than in 1988. We sampled 390 seals during 1992-2000 and satellite-tagged 47 non-pups and 27 pups. Most tagged...

We report on the results of a large-scale contingent valuation (CV) study conducted after the Exxon Valdez oil spill to assess the harm caused by it. Among the issues considered are the design features of the CV survey, its administration to a national sample of U.S. households, estimation of household willingness to pay to prevent another Exxon Valdez type oil spill, and issues related to reli...