Marine environments are frequently exposed to oil spills as a result of transportation, oil drilling or fuel usage. Whereas large oil spills and their effects have been widely documented, more common and recurrent small spills typically escape attention. To fill this important gap in the assessment of oil-spill effects, we performed two independent supervised full sea releases of 5 m(3) of crud...

The growths of oil and gas exploration and production activities have increased environmental problems, such as oil spillage and the resulting pollution. The study of the methods for cleaning up oil spills is a critical issue to protect the environment. Various techniques are available to contain oil spills, but they are typically time consuming, energy inefficient and create secondary pollutio...

The wintertime maritime traffic operations in the Gulf of Finland are managed through the Finnish-Swedish Winter Navigation System. This establishes the requirements and limitations for the vessels navigating when ice covers this area. During winter navigation in the Gulf of Finland, the largest risk stems from accidental ship collisions which may also trigger oil spills. In this article, a mod...

Several oil spills occurred at two oil platforms in Bohai Sea, China on June 4 and 17, 2011. The oil spills were subsequently imaged by different types of satellite sensors including SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar), Chinese HJ-1-B CCD and NOAA MODIS. In order to detect the oil spills more accurately, images of the former three sensors were used in this study. Oil spills were detected using the s...

In the study, we propose a fast region-based method for the detection of oil spills in SAR images. The proposed method combines the image segmentation technique and conventional detection theory to improve the accuracy of oil spills detection. From the image statistical characteristics, we first segment the image into regions by using moment preserving method. Then, to get a more integrated seg...

Automatic detection and monitoring of oil spills and illegal oil discharges is of fundamental importance in ensuring compliance with marine legislation and protection of the coastal environments, which are under considerable threat from intentional or accidental oil spills, uncontrolled sewage and wastewater discharged. In this paper the level set based image segmentation was evaluated for the ...

Oil pollution is in the forefront ofpublic attention because of the recent series of oil spills from tankers such as the Argo Merchant. Oil spillage frequently destroys the marine flora and fauna; the most striking single effect is the oiling of large numbers of marine birds. For example, as many as 30,000 birds died after the grounding of the Torrey Canyon at Seven Stones Reef, Great Britain i...

The occurrence of oil spills is a global problem that requires a complex set of scientists, engineers, governments, corporations, and communities to address. The objective of this special feature is to understand the dynamic process of adaptation in the face of economic and ecological vulnerabilities as related to major oil spills, such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the United States in...

BACKGROUND The Deepwater Horizon (DH) blowout resulted in fisheries closings across the Gulf of Mexico. Federal agencies, in collaboration with impacted Gulf states, developed a protocol to determine when it is safe to reopen fisheries based on sensory and chemical analyses of seafood. All federal waters have been reopened, yet concerns have been raised regarding the robustness of the protocol ...