Assessment and Restoration Division

From March 30 to April 20, tune in as we go back in time to the day of our country’s largest marine oil spill, what’s happened since then, and how we’re better prepared for future spills. In our latest blog, learn more about how the spill impacted sea turtles and marine mammals. 

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster spread spilled oil deep into the ocean’s depths and along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, compromising the complex ecosystem and local economies. The response and the natural resources damage assessment were the largest in the nation’s history. In this 2017 blog, learn more about the natural resources injured by the Deepwater Horizon spill, and how our team assessed those injuries. 

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill began on April 20, 2010, with a blowout of BP’s Macondo drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to the death of 11 men, the spill resulted in the largest mobilization of resources addressing an environmental emergency in the history of the United States. The size of the spill required the Emergency Response Division to refine tracking subsurface oil, flowrate calculations, and long-term oil transport modeling. Data and information management became a paramount issue ...

Since thousands of oil spills of varying sizes occur in U.S. waters each year, oil spill scientists must be prepared to respond to and assess the impacts of oil on marine mammals. To do this, the NOAA has published: "Guidelines for Assessing Exposure and Impacts of Oil Spills on Marine Mammals," which is available for the public on the NOAA Central Library website. These guidelines provide a review of considerations for marine mammals under NOAA's jurisdiction, incorporating knowledge gained from previous oil spills.

This week, we’re taking a closer look at what sensitivity mapping is, how it’s used, and why it’s so important. A snapshot of the resources in a specific area, sensitivity mapping can be a valuable tool both in and out of the spill response community. Our latest blog takes you through the process of using sensitivity mapping to prioritize response activities during an oil spill.

*A Halloween Spooky Science Story 

Once there were six waterways cursed by pollution. 

But terrifying toxins and oozing oil spills were not the first dooms to befall these rivers, each of them had already been dammed. The dams had been constructed for a variety of important reasons, but as the years passed and they fell out of use, an evil crept over them. 

Arctic cod (Boreogadus saida) are small, ice-affiliated forage fish, that can make up more than 80% of all living fish in Arctic waters. Arctic cod have a circumpolar distribution that includes the Chukchi, Beaufort, and Bering seas in the Alaskan Arctic, and are a critical link in Arctic food webs. 

This keystone Arctic species is also particularly vulnerable to oil spills, which was the focus of a new study titled “Embryonic crude oil exposure impairs growth and lipid allocation in a keystone Arctic forage fish.”

Working under NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, 2019 Hollings scholar Leah Moore spent her summer working on the story map “Building a Resilient Community: NOAA’s Hazard Exposure and Risk Exploration (HERE) Tool” — a publicly available link will be available later this summer.

During National Water Quality Month, NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration shares some of the ways we preserve and improve water quality through cleanup and restoration. 

NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration develops scientific solutions to keep the coasts clean from threats of oil, hazardous waste, and marine debris — all of which are major pollutants that can hugely affect the water quality of our coastal natural resources. 

This blog was written by Kavya Varkey, a high school student from the Seattle area who interned with OR&R in the summer of 2018. Kavya was instrumental in developing the new story map on the Lower Duwamish River Superfund site. An urban river with a history of industrial pollution that began in the 1900s, the Lower Duwamish River continues to undergo both cleanup and restoration efforts. To learn more, view the new story map here.