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”
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”
Coupling between the atmosphere and ocean is scale-dependent. For example, in the mid-latitudes and at oceanic mesoscales (spatial scales between 10 and hundreds of kilometers), the air–sea interactions are driven by the oceanic variability, and the atmosphere responds to the changes in the sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTA), which are created by fast oceanic advection. This study explores these interactions, using a regional high-resolution atmosphere–ocean coupled model with a realistic atmospheric component and a semi-idealized oceanic model of a zonal flow. Read more “A Study of Mesoscale Air–Sea Interaction in the Southern Ocean with a Regional Coupled Model”
![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)
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”
The depletion of readily accessible oil reservoirs in conjunction with the demand for fossil fuels leads to the exploration and production of remote deposits, esp. in the deep sea. Operations at hard-to-reach locations far beyond atmospheric conditions are challenging and associated with elevated risk, Read more “Deep Sea Oil Spills-Investigating Droplet Size Distributions and Oil Fate in Experiments and Modeling”
Paleoclimate proxies suggest that modern droughts in North America pale in comparison to those of the Early to Mid-Holocene and the Medieval Warm Period. Modeling studies show that both tropical SSTs and local dust feedbacks modulate drought conditions over North America. We hypothesize that Read more “Evaluating the Roles of Tropical North Atlantic SSTs and Local and Remote Dust Impacts on North American Dought”
Cloud radiative feedbacks are disabled via “cloud-locking” in the Community Earth System Model, version 1.2 (CESM1.2), to result in a shift in El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) periodicity from 2–7 years to decadal time scales. We hypothesize that cloud radiative feedbacks may impact the periodicity in three ways, by: Read more “Cloud Radiative Feedbacks and El Niño—Southern Oscillation”
Environmental sensitivity indices (ESIs) have long been used to identify coastal and shoreline resources particularly vulnerable to oil spills and ensuing mitigation measures. In the Gulf of Mexico, oil production by the United States and Mexico has increasingly focused on deepwater sources. Read more “Comparative Environmental Sensitivity of Offshore Gulf of Mexico Waters Potentially Impacted by Ultra-Deep Oil Well Blowouts”
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”
We are happy to announce the first seminar as part of the Lunch-bytes Seminar Series this semester at RSMAS. Lunch-bytes were a series of informal seminars that existed from 2010 to 2012, with a focus on various computing topics. Lunch-bytes aims to provide an informal forum for RSMAS students, researchers, and faculty to discuss and exchange knowledge on various computational tools, techniques, and programming languages. Read more “Lunch-Bytes Seminar 10/14/2015 RSMAS Campus”