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Home | Image Galleries | Emergency Response
Mearns Rock Time Series
A photo time series of Mearns Rock, a large boulder located in the intertidal zone at Snug Harbor on Knight Island, Prince William Sound, Alaska.
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Mearns Rock 1990
What You See
In this photograph, taken 15 months after the spill, you see only the top portion of the boulder because the tide was in at the time that the photo was taken. The boulder's surface is almost entirely covered by young plants of the algae Fucus gardneri (commonly called "rockweed" or "popweed"), which is abundant on the shorelines of Prince William Sound. On the right section of the boulder (the area of white color) is a settlement of young barnacles. The dark patch (on the right section) is a colony of small mussels.
What's Happening
No oil appears on the boulder because biological processes have cleared it away. NOAA biologists assume that adult Fucus plants that were present at the time of the spill were damaged by the oil and/or the particularly cold temperatures of the previous winter. Young Fucus have grown since that time.
(07.01.90, Snug Harbor, Knight Island, Alaska)
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Related Pages on Our Site |
- Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Overview of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Includes links to many related resources, including photo galleries.
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- Graphing Changes in Marine Life Abundance Try your hand at some marine biology! Follow these steps, designed for middle and high school students, to make a study of the marine life occupying a section, or quadrat, of Mearns Rock.
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- Mearns Rock Time Series How does marine life recover from a major, one-time stress, such as an oil spill? As you will learn here, the answer is not simple.
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- Northwest Bay Study Site Photos of one of our study sites, a rocky beach on an islet in Northwest Bay, shortly after high-pressure, hot-water washing in 1989, and again in 1998.
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- Response to the Exxon Valdez Spill Within hours after the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989, a team of NOAA OR&R scientists arrived on-scene.
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