The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in March 1989 in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and was one of the worst environmental disasters on record in the United States. Despite long-term data collection over the nearly three decades since the spill, tremendous uncertainty remains as to how significantly the spill affected fishery resources. Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) and some wild Pacific sal...

After an oil spill it is essential to know if an area is going to be affected by the oil slicks generated. The system presented here forecasts the presence or not of oil slicks in a certain area of the open sea after an oil spill using Case-Based Reasoning methodology. CBR is a computational methodology designed to generate solutions to a certain problem by analysing previous solutions given to...

Uen-Chin Liang National Tsinghua University Department of Atomic Science Hsinchu 30043, Taiwan Abstract. Oil spillage in a body of water has been of great environmental concern. We present in this paper an automatic oil-spill detection system, which employs thin-film and wavefront-splitting interference techniques to determine the existence of surface oil or oil drops in water. Two independent ...

Ocean forecasting and oil spill modelling and tracking are complex activities requiring specialised institutions. In this work we present a lighter solution based on the Operational Ocean Forecast Python Engine (OOFε) and the oil spill model General NOAA Operational Modelling Environment (GNOME). These two are robust relocatable and simple to implement and maintain. Implementations of the opera...

Symbiotic associations can be disrupted by disturbance or by changing environmental conditions. Endophytes are fungal and bacterial symbionts of plants that can affect performance. As in more widely known symbioses, acute or chronic stressor exposure might trigger disassociation of endophytes from host plants. We tested this hypothesis by examining the effects of oil exposure following the Deep...

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 failure of a tailing pond dam at the Aznalcóllar pyrite mine (SW Spain) in April 1998 released a toxic spill affecting approximately 4300 ha along the Agrio and Guadiamar valleys. Two years later, we have studied yield and concentration of mineral nutrients and trace elements in sunflower plants grown in the spill-affected soil, and in an adjacent unaffected soil as comparison. The study ha...

In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig caught fire and exploded, releasing almost 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the ensuing 3 months. Thousands of oil spill workers participated in the spill response and clean-up efforts. The GuLF STUDY being conducted by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is an epidemiological study to investigate potential ad...

The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill led to rapid microbial community shifts in the Gulf of Mexico, including the formation of unprecedented quantities of marine oil snow (MOS) and of a massive subsurface oil plume. The major taxa that bloomed in sea surface oil slicks during the spill included Cycloclasticus, and to a lesser extent Halomonas, Alteromonas, and Pseudoalteromonas-organisms that ...

An unprecedented volume of crude oil was burned during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill response, with an estimated 220,000-310,000 bbl of surface oil consumed by in-situ burning over a ten-week period in 2010. Most of the resultant burn residue from these large-scale operations sank in the relatively deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. However, in late 2010, the deep water royal red shrimp fishe...