The oil spill risk analysis (OSRA) model is a tool used by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to evaluate oil spill risks to biological, physical, and socioeconomic resources that could be exposed to oil spill contact from oil and gas leasi...
Biological oil weathering facilitated by specialized heterotrophic microbial communities plays a key role in the fate of petroleum hydrocarbon in the ocean. The most common methods of assessing oil biodegradation involve (i) measuring changes in the...
This paper presents findings from eight post-hoc interviews with individuals representing the key community partner organizations that facilitated and hosted data collection for an in-person mixed-methods survey about disaster resilience and prepared...
A novel empirical approach to categorize oil slicks’ sea surface expressions in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) measurements into oil seeps or oil spills is investigated, contributing both to academic remote sensing research and to practical app...
Mental health issues are a significant concern after technological disasters such as the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill; however, there is limited knowledge about the long-term effects of oil spills. The study was part of a larger research effort to improve und...
The present review summarizes the literature on the effects of oil spill on the U.S. Gulf of Mexico coastal vegetation including freshwater-, brackish-, and salt-marshes. When in contact with plant tissues, oil may have adverse impacts via physical a...
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DWH) was one of the largest hydrocarbon disasters in US history. The estimated 5 million barrels of oil that poured into the Gulf of Mexico had a devastating impact on the natural environment, as well as on the l...
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is responsible for managing the development of US Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) energy and mineral resources. Because oil spills may occur from offshore oil and gas activities, BOEM conducts oil spill risk...
The Environmental Studies Program (ESP) at the United States Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is funded by the United States Congress to support BOEM’s mission, which is to use the best available science to responsibly manage the development...
The DeepWater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) in 2010 raised the public awareness on potential spills from offshore exploration activities. It became apparent that knowledge of potential oil pathways in the case of a spill is important...
In this review paper, we briefly discuss the occurrence of oil spills and their behavior under natural sea conditions and clean-up methods, as well as their environmental and economic impacts. We discuss methodologies for oil spill modeling used to p...
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 se...
The southern Gulf of Mexico (sGoM) is highly susceptible to receiving environmental impacts due to the recent increase in oil-related activities. In this study, we assessed the changes in the bacterioplankton community structure caused by a simulated...
31 October 2017
The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) explosion in 2010 is the largest oil spill (Macondo) in U.S. history. We focused on gaining an understanding of the physical health and mental health effects attributable to the Macondo oil spill. This is a report of a cro...
Our research focuses on refining the ability to discriminate two petrogenic oil-slick categories: the sea surface expression of naturally-occurring oil seeps and man-made oil spills. For that, a long-term RADARSAT-2 dataset (244 scenes imaged between...
Passive acoustic monitoring has been successfully used to study deep-diving marine mammal populations. To assess regional population trends of sperm whales in the northern Gulf of Mexico (GoM), including impacts of the Deepwater Horizon platform oil...
This study investigates the spatiotemporal evolution of oil released during the Agia Zoni II shipwreck in the Saronic Gulf in 2017, employing the OpenOil module of the OpenDrift framework. The simulation integrates oceanographic and meteorological da...
This article discusses unattributable small-scale marine oil spills, particularly focusing on their environmental and socio-economic impacts in Musandam, Oman. There is a research gap in the literature on unattributable small-scale marine oil spills...
April 20, 2010 marked the start of the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest marine oil spill in US history, which contaminated coastal wetland ecosystems across the northern Gulf of Mexico. We used hyperspectral data from 2010 a...
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s airborne Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) was deployed in June 2010 in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. UAVSAR is a fully polarimetric L...
Land cover on the Mississippi–Alabama barrier islands was surveyed in 2010–2011 as part of continuing research on island geomorphic and vegetation dynamics following the 2005 impact of Hurricane Katrina. Results of the survey include sub-meter GPS lo...
National environmental regulations lack short-term standards for variability in fine particulate matter (PM2.5); they depend solely on concentration-based standards. Twenty-five years of research has linked short-term PM2.5, that is, increases of at...
An Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) aims to use Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) measurements for discriminating between two oil slick types observed on the sea surface: naturally-occurring oil seeps versus human-related oil spills—the use of satellite...
The marine environment has long been affected by chronic operational oil pollution, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of seabirds. In many countries Beached Bird Survey programmes have been established, in which dead birds with oil-conta...
14 July 2017
Seafood contains health-promoting fatty acids, but is often contaminated with mercury (Hg), complicating recommendations and choices around fish consumption during pregnancy. Self-reported diet may be subject to inaccuracy and this inaccuracy could d...
The purpose of this paper is to calculate the energy return on financial investment (EROFI) of oil and gas production in the ultra-deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GoM) in 2009 and for the estimated oil reserves of the Macondo Prospect (Mississippi Canyon B...
Coastal ecosystems are greatly endangered due to anthropogenic development and climate change. Multiple disturbances may erode the ability of a system to recover from stress if there is little time between disturbance events. We evaluated the ability...
Marine snow was implicated in the transport of oil to the seafloor during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but the exact processes remain controversial. In this study, we investigated the concentrations and distributions of the 16 USEPA priority poly...
Extensive asphalt pavements have persisted along >25 km (km) of shoreline on Abu Ali Island, on the Arabian (Persian) Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia, reportedly stranding as a result of the 1983–1985 Nowruz oil spills. A study was conducted in O...
Oil spill incidents threaten the marine ecological environment. Detecting sea surface oil slicks by remote sensing images provides support for the efficient treatment of oil spills. This is important for sustainable marine development. However, tradi...
The authors wish to make the following change to their paper (Patel et al. 2018). [...]
The Baltic Sea is a unique and sensitive brackish-water ecosystem vulnerable to damage from shipping activities. Despite high levels of maritime safety in the area, there is a continued risk of oil spills and associated harmful environmental impacts....
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...
Oil spill SAR images are characterized by high noise, low contrast, and irregular boundaries, which lead to the problems of overfitting and insufficient capturing of detailed features of the oil spill region in the current method when processing oil...
Following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident of a massive blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists from government, industry, and academia collaborated to advance oil spill modeling and share best practices in model algorithms, parameterizations,...
In the United States (U.S.), oil exploration and production remain critical economic engines for local, state, and federal economies. Recently, the U.S. Department of the Interior expressed interest in expanding offshore oil production by making avai...
Oil spills have always been a threat to the marine ecological environment; thus, it is important to identify and divide oil spill areas on the ocean surface into segments after an oil spill accident occurs to protect the marine ecological environment...
Oil spills on the ocean surface are a serious threat to the marine ecosystem. Automation of oil spill detection through full/dual polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is considered a good aid for oil spill disaster management. This pape...
Petroleum extraction, transportation, and consumption in the marine environment contribute to a large portion of anthropogenic oil spills into the ocean. While previous research focuses more on large oil spill accidents from oil tankers or offshore o...
Oil spill accidents in marine environments have a massive impact on ecosystems. Various methods have been developed to detect oil spills using high-resolution optical imagery. However, ocean waves caused by heavy winds occurring in the accident area...
Oil contamination is a major source of pollution in the environment. It may take decades for oil-contaminated soils to be remedied. This study models oil-contaminated soils using one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters, the onshore oil sp...
Dispersants have been used in several oil spill accidents, but little information is available on their effectiveness in Baltic Sea conditions with low salinity and cold seawater. This study investigated the effects of dispersant use on petroleum hyd...
Unprecedented recruitment of Gulf menhaden (Brevoortia patronus) followed the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout (DWH). The foregone consumption of Gulf menhaden, after their many predator species were killed by oiling, increased competition among menhad...
Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar is an important tool in the effective detection of marine oil spills. In this study, two cases of Radarsat-2 Fine mode quad-polarimetric synthetic aperture radar datasets are exploited to detect a well-known oil...
The Loop Current (LC) system controls the connectivity between the northern Gulf of Mexico (GoM) region and the Straits of Florida. The evolution of the LC and the shedding sequence of the LC anticyclonic ring (Eddy Franklin) were crucial for the fat...
Accurate segmentation of marine oil spills in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is crucial for emergency response and environmental remediation. However, current deep learning methods are still limited by two long-standing bottlenecks: first, mul...
The Gulf of Mexico (GoM) is an important source of oil for the United States and Mexico. There has been growing interest, particularly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in characterizing the fungal diversity of the GoM and identifying isolates f...
Submerged oil, oil in the water column (neither at the surface nor on the bottom), was found in the form of oil droplet layers in the mid depths between 900–1300 m in the Gulf of Mexico during and following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The...
Porphyrins are highly persistent in the environment and represent a helpful biogeochemical attribute to assess the spatial distribution of the effects of oil spills on ecosystems and their resilience. In areas prone to natural and human-originated oi...
Oil spills are adverse events that may be very harmful to ecosystems and the food chain. In particular, large sea oil spills are very dramatic occurrences that may affect sea and coastal areas. Hence, the sustainability of oil rig infrastructures and...
of 2