Two popular marine animals—dolphins and sea turtles—are the focus of new publications from the Sea Grant Oil Spill Science Outreach Team. In the aftermath of the largest oil spill in history, many expressed concern about its impact on these long-lived, slow-to-mature creatures. Now, almost seven years after the spill, scientists have a better understanding of how they fared. The team examined this research, synthesizing peer-reviewed findings into two easy-to-understand outreach bulletins.
What is toxicity? Most definitions would explain it as the degree to which a substance is poisonous.
Knowing a substance’s toxic levels is particularly important to federal agencies that use the information to test potential risks posed to people’s health and to the environment.
So how do scientists know how toxic something is and whether or not that substance—be it oil, chemical treating agents or toxic metals—will be toxic when introduced into marine or coastal waters?
The joint NOAA-Environmental Protection Agency hazardous chemicals database is now available as a mobile app.
Named CAMEO Chemicals, the database has information on thousands of chemicals and hazardous substances, including response recommendations and predictions about explosions, toxic fumes, and other hazards. Firefighters and emergency planners around the world use CAMEO Chemicals to help them prepare for and respond to emergencies.
How do you return a dumpsite to a natural area with productive wetlands? With the hard work of scientists, and federal and state officials.
The Raleigh Street Dump Site is located in an industrial area of Tampa, east of McKay Bay. The low-lying land was once pocked with sinkholes and littered with battery casings, furnace slag, trash, and construction debris dumped at the site from 1977 to 1991
The environmental toll from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster was enormous, demanding a massive deployment of people and materials to measure the adverse effects.
Federal and state agencies worked quickly to scale up the emergency response, clean up the spill, mount a large-scale effort to assess the injuries to wildlife and other natural resources, and record how these lost resources adversely affected the public.
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.
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. NOAA’s web-based environmental management mapping tool proved invaluable in tracking and sharing data across the many teams and command posts.
