Publications
The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill likely affected ecosystem services in the Gulf of Mexico. To test this hypothesis, we configured a “Ecopath with Ecosim” model and quantified the effects of commercial fisheries and particulate organic carbon (POC) sequestration from 2004 to 2014, encompassing DWH. Read more “The Effect of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on two Ecosystem Services in the Northern Gulf of Mexico”
Publications
Major oil spills immensely impact the environment and society. Coastal fishery-dependent communities are especially at risk as their fishing grounds are susceptible to closure because of seafood contamination threat. Read more “Predicting the Impact of Future Oil-Spill Closures on Fishery-Dependent Communities—A Spatially Explicit Approach”
![Fig. 2 Spatial DWH cumulative extents. (A) Cumulative NESDIS anomaly daily composites integrated from 20 April 2010 to 21 July 2010. Daily fishing closures are marked with gray lines; the cumulative fishing closure area is marked with a thick dashed yellow line. The black star represents the location of the DWH blowout [adapted by permission from Springer-Nature: Scenarios and Responses to Future Deep Oil Spills: Fighting the Next War by S. Murawski, C. Ainsworth, S. Gilbert, D. Hollander, C. Paris, M. Schlüter, D. Wetzel, Eds., 2019 (18)]. (B) Cumulative value of daily average oil concentrations (ppb), integrated across the same time span as (A) and across water depths. Vertical depth layers are 0 to 1 m, 1 to 20 m, and in 20-m increments down to 2500 m. Sediment and water samples with higher-than-background concentration are marked in bright green and dark blue circles, respectively [adapted by permission from Springer-Nature: Scenarios and Responses to Future Deep Oil Spills: Fighting the Next War by S. Murawski, C. Ainsworth, S. Gilbert, D. Hollander, C. Paris, M. Schlüter, D. Wetzel, Eds., 2019 (18)]. Red crosses in (B) represent approximate locations of DWH-related oil detections reported in previous studies: (i) (9), (ii) (7), (iii) (12), (iv) (13), and (v) (15). Daily fishery closures are marked with black polygons; the cumulative fishery closure area is marked with a dashed thick polygon. AB, Apalachee Bay; DP, Deep Plume; EFS, East Florida Shelf; FK, Florida Keys; LC, Loop Current System; TXS, Texas Shores; WFS, West Florida Shelf. (C) Categorization of the modeled oil spill are as follows: (i) nontoxic, PAH concentrations above background level and smaller than 0.5 and 1 ppb at the surface (depth, 0 to 1 m) and in the water column (depth, >1 m), respectively; (ii) toxic-to-biota and invisible, PAH concentrations 0.5 to 17 ppb at the surface and above 1 ppb in the water column; and (iii) toxic and visible, PAH concentrations above 17 ppb. In (C), categories were computed according to maximal concentrations across time. (D) Duration of toxic concentrations across the domain. (E) LC50 of 12 experiments examining the photoinduced toxicity to blue crab (31), fiddler crab (33), mahi mahi (29, 30), red drum (32), and speckled sea trout (32) (for more details, see table S2). (F) The spatial extent of the toxic concentrations from (E); color codes in (F) are according to bar colors in (E), representing concentrations exceeding LC50. In (F), toxic PAH of 0.5 ppb was concentrations were considered for surface waters only (depth, 0 to 1 m).](https://i0.wp.com/idsc.miami.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Spatial-cumulative-extents-of-the-Deepwater-Horizon-oil-spill-Berenshtein-et-al-2020-Science-Advances.jpg?resize=730%2C350&ssl=1)
Publications
Abstract Major oil spills are catastrophic events that immensely affect the environment and society, yet determining their spatial extent is a highly complex task. During the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) blowout, ~149,000 km2 of the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) was covered by oil slicks and vast areas of the Gulf were closed for fishing. Read more “Invisible Oil Beyond the Deepwater Horizon Satellite Footprint”
Publications
The ever-growing increase in deep-sea oil explorations in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) has been raising concerns with regard to future oil spills. Major oil spills in the GoM such as the Deepwater Horizon (DWH 2010) and the Ixtoc 1 (1979) resulted in extensive pollution of the pelagic, sea-floor, and coastal ecosystems. Read more “Comparison of the Spatial Extent, Impacts to Shorelines, and Ecosystem, and Four-Dimensional Characteristics of Simulated Oil Spills”
News - Archived
At least one CCS Member is doing fieldwork for three weeks this summer in the Gulf of Mexico as part of a multi-institution research project to study ocean flow. Funded by BP through the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, Dr. Tamay Ozgokmen is the project director of the Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbon in the Environment (CARTHE) looking at how the Gulf waters transport things like oil or other pollutants. Read more “Field Work: Ground-Truthing Gulf Surface Water Movement”
News - Archived
Dr. Villy Kourafalou is a Research Associate Professor at UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, where she leads the Coastal and Shelf Seas Group in the Division of Meteorology and Physical Oceanography. She is also the co-Director of the Ocean Modeling and Observing System Simulation Experiments joint center with the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Her research focuses on numerical modeling of circulation and transport on continental shelves and marginal seas, including coastal processes influenced by land runoff, weather events and deep sea oceanic currents.