From the darkness emerges a boot. An old leather, steel-toed, work boot. It shouldn’t be there resting on the seafloor nearly two kilometers deep. I’m speachless. Even knowin this was going to be one of the toughest dives of my career, I’m still not prepared.

Seven years prior in 2010, Marla Valentine and Mark Benfield were the first scientist to visit the deep-sea floor after the Deepwater Horizon accident. On 20 April 2010, and continuing for 87 days, approximately 4 million barrels spilled from the Macondo Wellhead making it the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. Just months after the oil spill, Valentine and Benfield conducted video observations with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) of the deep-sea impact. Overall, they found a deep-sea floor ravaged by the spill. Much of the diversity was lost and the seafloor littered with the carcasses of pyrosomes, salps, sea cucumbers, sea pens, and glass sponges.

Researchers continued to find severe impacts on deep-sea life. The numerical declines were staggering within the first few months; forams (↓80–93%), copepods (↓64%), meiofauna (↓38%), macrofauna (↓54%) and megafauna (↓40%). One year later, the impacts on diversity were still evident and correlated with increases in total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), and barium in deep-sea sediments. In 2014, PAH was still 15.5 and TPH 11.4 times higher in the impact zone versus the non-impact zone, and the impact zones still exhibited depressed diversity. Continued research on corals found the majority of colonies still had not recovered by 2017. However, studies examining the impacts of the DWH oil spill on most deep-sea life ended in 2014.

This gap in knowledge on the lingering impacts of one of the largest oil spills of all time is why I sit here in this cold, dark, ROV control room staring at a work boot in the abyss. A year prior, I had reached out to Mark Benfield about replicating his ROV methods and locations. I am here seven years after his study beginning to replicate his first video transect.

Within minutes of reaching the seafloor with the ROV, every scientist on the vessel staring at monitors showing live video from remote seafloor knew something was wrong. As Mark Benfield, Clif Nunnally, and I report in a new open-access article, the deep sea was not recovering at the impact site.  The seafloor was unrecognizable from the healthy habitats in the deep Gulf of Mexico, marred by wreckage, physical upheaval and sediments covered in black, oily marine snow.

Near the wreckage and wellhead, many of the animals characteristic of other areas of the deep Gulf of Mexico, including sea cucumbers, Giant Isopods, glass sponges, and whip corals, were absent.  What we observed was a homogenous wasteland, in great contrast to the rich heterogeneity of life seen in a healthy deep sea.

Conspicuously absent were the sessile animals that typically cling to any type of hard structure in an otherwise soft, muddy habitat.  Hard substrate in the deep sea is a valuable commodity but at the Deepwater Horizon site metal and other hard substrates were devoid of typically deep-sea colonizers.

The seafloor at impact site was characterized by high numbers of shrimps and crabs.  Crabs showed clearly visible physical abnormalities and sluggish behavior compared to the healthy crabs we had observed elsewhere.  We believe these crustaceans are drawn to the site because degrading hydrocarbons serve as luring sexual hormone mimics. Once these crustaceans reach the site they may become too unhealthy to leave much like those prehistoric mammals and the Le Brea tarpits.

The ROV dive began with a boot belonging to one of the workers on the Deepwater Horizon rig. The dive ended at the wellhead, now capped with a memorial to those workers who lost their lives. A dive bookended with reminders of the human tragedy of the oil spill. The narrative that unfolded between these was an environmental catastrophe. In an ecosystem that measures longevity in centuries and millennia the impact of 4 million barrels of oil continues to constitutes a crisis of epic proportions.

Valentine, Marla M., and Mark C. Benfield. “Characterization of epibenthic and demersal megafauna at Mississippi Canyon 252 shortly after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.” Marine Pollution Bulletin 77.1-2 (2013): 196-209.

McClain, Craig R., Clifton Nunnally, and Mark C. Benfield. “Persistent and substantial impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on deep-sea megafauna.” Royal Society Open Science 6.8 (2019): 191164.

The post The lingering and extreme impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the deep sea first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post Experience the Life of the Deep Gulf of Mexico in 20 Videos first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post The Fantastical Beasts of the Deep Gulf of Mexico first appeared on Deep Sea News.

WE’RE ON A BOAT! That’s right, The Blogfather Dr. M and myself (Dr. Bik, Assistant Blogmaster?) are in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico AT THIS VERY MOMENT!

To celebrate this awesome scientific cruise, we’re running a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session Tomorrow, Saturday May 27th from 8AM – 8PM Central Standard Time (Louisiana, USA time zone).

Hi @reddit_AMA! Ask me anything this Sat. I’m currently on the ocean for a science research cruise studying the deep sea with a robot #AMA pic.twitter.com/dvkQ67VPx8

— Craig McClain, Ph.D. (@DrCraigMc) May 25, 2017

Why are we here? Well Dr. M has a nifty new NSF grant to research wood falls in the deep oceans; logs and whole trees that saturate with water and sink to the deep-sea floor. These wooden carcasses bring a rare commodity to the deep sea devoid of light and plants: food. On the seafloor, these wood falls are covered in unique marine invertebrates wholly adapted to eating wood.

As part of this work, Dr. M is also collecting sediment cores, which I’ll be using to isolate nematodes for environmental sequencing and genomics work.

But there is a whole team of people here on the boat, and you can ask them anything too! Our scientific cast is:

–Dr. Craig McClain, a deep-sea biologist, DSN Blogfather, and the Executive Director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON).
– Dr. Clif Nunnally (LUMCON) – Research Associate, Actual Person in Charge of the cruise
– Chase Landry (LUMCON/Nicholls State) – Undergraduate Researcher, Cajun Translator
– Dr. Virginia Schutte (LUMCON)- Media Officer, unfortunately a Morning Person
– Dr. Thomas Webb (U. of Sheffield) – Statistical Guru, “All the gear, no idear” (he’s British)
– Dr. Holly Bik (U. California Riverside) – Microbial Genomics and nematode taxonomy, bringing high fashion to the high seas
– River Dixon (U. South Carolina) – Undergraduate Researcher, has no idea what she signed up for
– Jason Bradley (Bradley Photographic) – Photographer, probably has kissed more sea animals than you
– Chase Lawson (Texas A&M) – Undergraduate Researcher, literally just spent 2 hours handling raw meat
– Dr. Alicia Caporaso (Bureau of Ocean Energy and Management) – Underwater Archaeologist, studies shipwrecks but can’t touch them

The post Reddit AMA (Saturday May 27th): DSN on a boat, throwing wood in the ocean! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Today is legendary! Why, you ask? Well, we are celebrating TEN YEARS of DSN posts. That’s right – if you go wayyyyyyyyy back in the archives you will note that the proto-Deep Sea News empire began with a little post by Dr. M on December 13, 2006.

What were we all doing in 2006? Well as for myself (this is Holly speaking), I was just starting my PhD research in good ol’ London towne. I was listening to a lot of Pussycat Dolls, and Christina Aguilera was going through that weird jazz phase. I was smoovely fixing nematodes on glass slides to the tune of Chamillionaire, and I had just signed up to this cool new website called Facebook.

As you can fathom, a lot has changed in 10 years. The DSN crew has moved forward and onwards in our careers, many of us metamorphosing from wee little student trainees into Real Scientists. Our list of contributors has changed and evolved. We write different types of posts now (should we remind Dr. M that he used to use DSN as a cruise blog?). In light of recent world events, our message and mission has become increasingly urgent.

But other things haven’t changed – our Core Values, although not formalized in writing until 2011, have always been a fundamental part of Deep Sea News. The passion, enthusiasm, and dedication of all of our past and present writers will never change. And of course I still listen to the Pussycat Dolls (because how can you NOT?)

So in celebration of our site’s 10 year anniversary, here we present you with our Top Ten (and then some) posts in DSN History:

2006 

Wetting my toes

Kim: Do I need to explain that the very first post on DSN is also that years highlight? It’s real, it’s sweet and it kicked off ten years of online shenanigans!

2007 

Just Science Weekend: They Eat Their Young

Jarrett: I <3 DSN in 2007. You can feel the online science world trying to figure out what it was. DSN was a more news-y place, with a heavy dose of reportage on the deep sea, like this awesome interview of sub pilot David Guggenheim. But amidst that, DSN was also figuring out who it was going to become – and this gem of a piece from Peter Etnoyer epitomizes the future, showing us that not only are deep sea fish all around us in our everyday lives, but man, do they sure like to cannibalize their babies. Mmmmmm….babiez.

2008

Dumping Pharmaceutical Waste In The Deep Sea

Rebecca: 2008 was a year or short-and-sweet posts, punctuated by long and well-researched articles on everything from coral age to deep ocean waves. DSN found a unique voice in being a place not just to report on the latest news, but also provide a scientist’s perspective on the way news about the ocean is reported in the press. This was also a year of raising awareness, with Dr. M’s post on pharmaceutical dumping in the deep as a perfect example of how blogs can call attention to unique and important stories that the press might miss.  

2009 

Holly: My favorite thing about 2009 is the epicness of Kevin Zelnio, best summarized with these two posts:

TGIF: TOTELY AWSUM SEE KUKUMBR!!!11!!!!11!

This post is a HILARIOUS animated video about a very boring sea cucumber, complete with rock guitar soundtrack. I think I just re-watched it like five times.

Thank You for Caring About Ocean Education!

(the more serious and dedicated size of Zelnio, where he coordinated a campaign at DonorsChoose.org and raised over $4800 from our readers. This campaign funded Ocean Education projects in K-12 classrooms around the country!)

2010 

All the coverage of the Deep Water Horizon Spill

Kim: Let’s be real, the Macondo well blowout sucked for the Gulf. But in terms of science, DSN was on it providing weekly updates and posting readable summaries of technical reports. The entire archive is here folks.

How To Cuddle Your Lady Right, by Smoove A

In this epic post, Miriam describes how one microscopic crustacean makes all the right moves and makes the mating happen. All biology textbooks should be written like this.

2011

From the Editor’s Desk: The Giant Squid Can Be A Panda For The Ocean

Holly: First of all, I love the 2011 Editor’s Desk posts because Craig very epically summarized himself with a minimalist icon of his bald head and beard. Second, the Giant Squid is WAYYYY more awesome than those damn dolphins and whales that everyone keeps going on about. And I prefer my cuddly mascots with lethal beaks and suckers, thank you very much.

From the Editor’s Desk: The Future of Deep-Sea News

This is the post where we formalized our now infamous core values – they were the brain child of the very first DSN retreat at the Georgia Aquarium, a weekend of meeting rooms and champagne in a rotating sky hotel. One of those things turned out better than the other.

2012 

#IamScience: Embracing Personal Experience on Our Rise Through Science

Jarrett: This post embodies DSN at it’s best. Kevin Z. takes us on his deeply personal and emotional journey into science. It’s a kind of story rarely told, and one that so many need to hear.

How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline

In this post, Craig connects American history with geological history, and ties it all together to understand how both impacted the 2012 presidential election. This post exploded the internet.

2013 

Kim: 2013 was just so awesome, I couldn’t just pick one!

10 Reasons Why Dolphins Are A$$holes

Do I even need to explain?

A field guide to privilege in marine science: some reasons we lack diversity.

When Miriam left DSN, she went out with a deeply important and thoughtful list. If you are an ally and want to see marine science grow, read this piece.

How many people does Kaiju need to eat everyday 

Sure we love all the creatures of the deep, but we also love Hollywood’s imaginary beasts as well. Craig answers some serious questions regarding the metabolism of the monsters in Pacific Rim.

The 60 foot long jet powered animal you’ve probably never heard of

In case you didn’t know what Rebecca’s niche in the online ecosystem, this is it. Someone found a giant gelatinous tube in the sea, she identifies it, and the internetz go wild. Rebecca, helping jellies go viral since 2013.

True Facts about Ocean Radiation and the Fukushima Disaster 

SPOILER ALERT: unless you live within 100 miles of the reactor, radiation from the Fukushima Disaster is still not harmful. This post was meant to be a guide to understanding radiation in the ocean. It ended up being one of most shared posts ever and the one we received death threats over.

2014

The Ever Increasing Size of Godzilla: Implications for Sexual Selection and Urine Production

Beth: Where Craig discusses the body size characteristics of godzilla over time, and the logical implications this would have on the millions of gallons of urine that massive godzilla would generate. This post has the thing that makes me love DSN – using scientific reasoning to explain a totally ridiculous thing. And it features Craig’s weird obsession with the size of things.

Runner up:

Sex, snails,sustenance…and rock and roll 

Where Craig uses great metaphors to explain some cool scientific studies on how snails reproduce based on food availability, featuring inappropriate references to rock stars and sex, and with a bonus soundtrack!

2015 

Ten Simple Rules for Effective Online Outreach

Alex: It’s like we all wrote a blog post… together. And then published it for realsies.

2016 

On Being Scared.

Alex: In which Craig verbalizes the place we have all been. I love and admire the vulnerability in this post and that he ended it so positively… that even when shit hits the proverbial sea fan, we get to choose how we respond. We get to choose how we show up.

Runner up:

The Twelve Days of Christmas: NASA Earth Science Edition

Alex: When you get retweeted by NASA… you get a spot on the list.

(Runner up #2)

The worst ocean environments to catch them all

Rebecca: When you love Pokémon but hate crushing barometric pressure.

The post A Decade of Deep Sea Decadence first appeared on Deep Sea News.

“Even though this is a BRITISH Petroleum spill, it’s AMERICA’S Ocean”

The post Nicholas Cage is making a movie about the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Check out this stunningly, beautiful recap of where we are now and the questions still remaining. This video, featured by onEarth Magazine, was concocted by the one and only Perrin Ireland (@experrinment). Having seen Perrin create exquisite works of science art live, I speak from experience when I say she is nothing short of spectacular.

The post Day 1,825 first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Just near 6 million liters of oil spilled out of Macondo well in 2010, about 6 supertankers worth of oil. The ramifications of the oil spill are still being documented and far reaching but included aberrant protein expression in fish gills, altered bacterial communities, and a whole suite nastiness in dolphins. At three different sites deep-sea corals appear to be impacted (study 1, study 2). Corals were covered with brown flocculent material and showed telltale signs of stress including excess mucus, enlargement of the skeletal elements (sclerites), and tissue loss. But new work suggests that it was not the oil that leads to unhealthy and dying corals rather dispersant.

Nearly 7 million liters of oil dispersants were applied during the cleanup efforts, 3 million of these in the deep sea directly near the wellhead. Yet little is known how oil and the dispersant, and the mixture of the two, impacts deep-sea corals. New work by Danielle DeLeo and colleagues sets out to address this in three different coral species. The group collected individual corals from the deep Gulf of Mexico using remote operated vehicles. On board corals were exposed to crude oil (collected from Macondo during the spill, dispersant (Corexit 9500A), a mixture of the two, and a seawater control.

All three deep-sea coral species examined showed more severe declines in health in response to dispersant alone and the oil-dispersant mixtures than the oil-only treatments. To restate, the dispersant was more toxic than the oil. Dispersants are known to disrupt the normal function of cell and organelle membranes. This means molecules are not transported normally across the membranes and cells cannot osmoregulate. Dispersant mixed with oil increases polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that organisms break down into toxic forms. Basically, the dispersant, as designed, increased the proportion of crude oil compounds that were biologically available.

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The post Given the choice, corals would prefer oil to dispersant first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The authors used chemical analysis to look for signatures of DWH oil, while simultaneously counting and identifying species of meiofauna (microscopic animals such as nematode worms, copepod crustaceans, etc.) and macrofauna (slightly larger, but still small animals such as polychaete worms). In this way, the presence of oil compounds could be compared with the number of deep-sea species present and the abundance of different organisms.

Aaaand, there’s no questioning these results. Here’s a map of sample sites, where color indicates impact (red = highest impact, with a high chemical signature of oil, low species diversity, and high nematode:copepod ratios, which is a biological indicator of oil pollution):

Now we zoom in and focus on the area surrounding the wellhead:

Since you can’t sample everywhere in the deep-sea, the authors also used their dataset to model the predicted benthic footprint over a wider area. Remember, red is bad:

And again, zooming into the area directly around the wellhead. Shazaam:

In addition to confirming the impact around the wellhead, this modeling approach picks up on shallow water impacts (orange patches off Louisiana, likely driven by surface transport of oil slicks), as well as a predicted area of moderate impact extending 17km to the southwest of the wellhead (remember that deepwater oil plume? Yeah, it seems to have affected animals living in the mud below it).

Note that the red “severely impacted” deep-sea area is 24.4 square kilometers, and the moderately impacted yellow area is 148 sq km (in total, that’s more than TWO Manhattans impacted by oil. Imagine New York City covered in sticky crude twice over…).

When you think about the size of the deep-sea impact, the road to recovery also seems quite grim. We’re talking possibly decades to return to business as normal:

Full recovery at impacted stations will require degradation or burial of DWH-derived contaminants in combination with naturally slow successional processes….Recovery of soft-bottom benthos after previous shallow-water oil spills has been documented to take years to decades [39,40]. In the deep-sea, temperature is uniformly around 4°C, and TOC [total organic carbon] and nutrient concentrations are low, so it is likely that [oil] hydrocarbons in sediments will degrade more slowly than in the water column or at the surface. Also, metabolic rates of benthos in the deep-sea are very slow and turnover times are very long [41,42]. Given deep- sea conditions, it is possible that recovery of deep-sea soft-bottom habitat and the associated communities in the vicinity of the DWH blowout will take decades or longer.

Reference:

Montagna PA, Baguley JG, Cooksey C, Hartwell I, Hyde LJ, Hyland JL, et al. (2013) Deep-Sea Benthic Footprint of the Deepwater Horizon Blowout. PLoS ONE, 8(8):e70540.

The post The Deep-sea footprint of Deepwater Horizon first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Past studies investigating effects of oil spills on salt marshes indicate that negative impacts on plants can be overcome by vegetation regrowth into disturbed areas once the oil has been degraded (8, 28–30). This finding suggests that marshes are intrinsically resilient to (i.e., able to recover from) oil-induced perturbation, especially in warmer climates such as the Gulf of Mexico, where oil degradation and plant growth rates may be high. (Silliman et al. 2012)

The finding’s aren’t surprising. Oil killed stuff. But even after 2 years, there’s been more speculation than published research and I think its important to highlight ongoing efforts to characterize the exact ways in which oil wreaked havoc on the Gulf ecosystem.

These data provide evidence of salt-marsh community die-off in the near-shore portion of the Louisiana shoreline after the BP-DWH oil spill because of high concentrations of oil at the edge of the marsh. Specifically, these findings suggest that the veg- etation at the marsh edge, by reaching above the highest high- tide line in the microtidal environment of the Gulf of Mexico, blocked and confined incoming oil to the shoreline region of the marsh. This shoreline containment of the oil may have protected inland marsh but led to extensive mortality of marsh plants lo- cated from the marsh edge to 5–10 m inland and to sublethal plant impacts on plants 10–20 m from the shoreline, where plant oiling was less severe….These data also suggest that the mechanism of the lethal effects of oil are more likely derived from interference with respiration and photosynthesis than from direct toxicity because plant death only occurred at high levels of oil coverage. (Silliman et al. 2012)

Silliman et al. found that this oil-induced plan death effectively speed up the rate of erosion in Louisiana marsh ecosystems. Oiled sites eroded twice as fast as reference (non-oiled) sites, for a full year (October 2010-October 2011) before leveling back off again.

Our results suggest that there are reasons for both optimism and concern about the impact of this oil spill on Mississippi deltaic marshes of Louisiana. On one hand, our results reveal that marsh vegetation displays remarkable resilience to oil spills by concentrating and confining the effects of oil to the marsh edge, recovering fully in noneroded areas after ∼1.5 y, and suppressing, through this recolonization, further accelerated erosion rates along the shoreline. The lack of oil on the marsh surface or on grasses at distances greater than 15 m from the shoreline at any site (Fig. 1A) suggests that incoming oil sheens were contained and prevented from moving into interior marshes by a baffling wall of live and dying salt-marsh grasses, a process that in itself increases the resistance of the extensive marsh ecosystem to oil spill. However, this resistance comes at a high cost for the impacted areas because marsh grass die-off and subsequent sediment exposure to waves resulted in a more than doubling of the rate of erosion of the intertidal platform, leading to permanent marsh ecosystem loss. (Silliman et al. 2012)

Louisiana’s salt marshes play a critical ecological roles, acting as storm buffers and breeding grounds that underpin the entire Gulf seafood industry. But they have been in trouble for a looooong time. The BP oil spill added extra stress to these already-stressed ecosystems–yet another anthropogenic impact promoting further ecosystem decline.

Reference

Silliman BR, van de Koppel J, McCoy MW, Diller J, Kasozi GN, Earl K, et al. Degradation and resilience in Louisiana salt marshes after the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2012 Jun. 25.

The post Gulf oil spill suffocated marsh grasses, enhanced erosion first appeared on Deep Sea News.