Exxon Valdez oil persists after 16 years

Quicknote environment & ecology
The oil era was fantastic for many people: it allowed unprecedented mobility of goods and persons on a planetary scale, and it made globalisation and the development of modern industrialized societies possible.

That said, petroleum is also a very nasty product: its use is responsible for an era of really dirty politics (energy imperialism, war, terrorism, mass poverty, underdevelopment, oppression and mass corruption - earlier post) and for a great deal of environmental destruction. Oil exploration and production is not a clean affair, the use of petroleum-based fuels is largely to blame for potentially catastrophic climate change, and products derived from crude oil (such as plastics) pollute our oceans and environment, and everything that lives in it for hundreds of years (earlier post).

The Exxon Valdez disaster has become the symbol capturing these darker sides of oil: the dirtiness of petroleum and the pristineness of a unique ecosystem never clashed so tragically as on March 24, 1989. Researers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) now show that, long after the disaster, the dirt still has the upper-hand over nature's capacity to restore itself...

Oil from the spill persists in an only slightly weathered form below the surface at some beaches along the Gulf of Alaska after 16 years and may persist for decades, the researchers conclude in a new report [*.html version or *.pdf version]. The study is scheduled for publication in the Feb. 15 issue of Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal.

Jeffrey W. Short and colleagues analyzed subsurface oil from the spill at 10 beaches, selected at random from among oil-contaminated areas included in their 2001 and 2005 studies. Earlier research demonstrated that buried oil could retain toxic components for years if buried in anoxic (oxygen-depleted) sediments where little decomposition from weathering occurs. The new study identified a different mechanism in which oil can be preserved in sediments that do contain oxygen. The oil persists because it exists in a thick, emulsified form sometimes termed "oil mousse" that resists weathering.

"Such persistence can pose a contact hazard to inter-tidally foraging sea otters, sea ducks, and shorebirds, create a chronic source of low-level contamination, discourage subsistence in a region where use is heavy and degrade the wilderness character of protected lands," the researchers conclude.

The advent of the bioeconomy might present environmental dilemma's of its own, but it is fundamentally based on far more elegant principles, in tune with nature: renewability and biodegradability. In the green economy, an Exxon Valdez disaster is unthinkable [entry ends here].
bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: renewable :: biodegradable :: petroleum :: oil :: environmental destruction :: disaster :: pollution :: Exxon Valdez :: Alaska ::