Islands in the oil: Quantifying salt marsh shoreline erosion after the Deepwater Horizon oiling

MARINE POLLUTION BULLETIN

卷:110

Article

Turner, R. Eugene¹  McClenachan, Giovanna¹  Tweel, Andrew W.¹ 

[1] Louisiana State Univ, Dept Oceanog & Coastal Sci, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 USA

关键词: Wetland;    Erosion;    Macondo oil spill;    Louisiana;    Rookery habitat;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.marpolbul.2016.06.046

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Qualitative inferences and sparse bay-wide measurements suggest that shoreline erosion increased after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon (DWH) disaster, but quantifying the impacts has been elusive at the landscape scale. We quantified the shoreline erosion of 46 islands for before and after the DWH oil spill to determine how much shoreline was lost, if the losses were temporary, and if recovery/restoration occurred. The erosion rates at the oiled islands increased to 275% in the first six months after the oiling, were 200% of that of the unoiled islands for the first 2.5 years after the oiling, and twelve times the average land loss in the deltaic plain of 0.4%y(-1) from 1988 to 2011. These results support the hypothesis that oiling compromised the belowground biomass of the emergent vegetation. The islands are, in effect, sentinels of marsh stability already in decline before the oil spill. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

【 授权许可】

Free