/cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/51978687/oilspill20161117_16.0.jpeg "The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill caused widespread land erosion in Louisiana")
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Marnie Winter remembers seeing the oil spread through the waters of Barataria Bay in southeastern Louisiana. It was 2010, just a few weeks after an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico began the largest marine oil spill in US history. About 4 million barrels of oil were poured into the sea, affecting more than 1,300 miles of shoreline from Texas to Florida.
“It was scary,” says Winter, who’s the assistant director of the environmental department at Jefferson parish, one of the three parishes surrounding Barataria Bay. She and other local officials began working with the Coast Guard to keep the oil from reaching the shore, but despite their efforts, the oil began coating the Louisiana marshlands. “It was no surprise that the vegetation would die,” Winter says.
Those plants and their roots, however, had been keeping the land from eroding. After the oil spill killed the plants, the marshlands lost a lot of land — especially in the shoreline areas that were heavily coated, according to a new study published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. That’s bad news for an area that’s already badly affected by land erosion. “It’s a big deal,” says Edward Overton, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, who was not involved in the study. “The land that’s lost basically is lost. There’s almost no way to get it back.”
The Louisiana wetlands are important for a variety of reasons. They’re home to many bird, mammal, and fish species. They purify water by filtering pollution and trapping sediment. They absorb carbon from the atmosphere and function as storm buffers, protecting people who live inland from flooding during storms. Finally, fishermen depend on wetlands to harvest oysters, shrimp, crabs, and fish.
These fragile ecosystems have been threatened by erosion for decades, and the deck is heavily stacked against them. Barataria Bay is located on the western side of the Mississippi River Delta. Once upon a time, the Mississippi River drained through these marshes, leaving its sediment in the delta — which replenished the land lost to the waves. But over the last century, people built levees in the Mississippi, which prevents the river from spreading sediment. That means the marshes just keep receding. There are other threats, too — for instance, the thousands of miles of canals that were dredged for oil and gas exploration. These canals allow saltwater to penetrate into the wetlands and kill freshwater vegetation. As if all that weren’t enough, this area is also prone to hurricanes and sea levels are rising — two more forces for erosion.
The oil spill increased the losses in Barataria Bay, according to the study done by the US Geological Survey with NASA. It’s not alone in oil-related erosion, either. Other studies have shown that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill caused land loss along the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. This latest research adds to that body of knowledge, using very valuable data from even before the oil spill occurred. “We just happened to have the perfect dataset,” says study co-author Cathleen Jones at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The researchers used shoreline images collected by a NASA radar instrument that can see through clouds and take highly detailed images of our planet during night and day. They analyzed measurements from June 2009 to October 2012. Before the spill, isolated places scattered throughout Barataria Bay lost land to the sea. In the first year after the Deepwater Horizon spill, areas that had been most exposed to the oil were heavily eaten away: the erosion was more widespread. The length of shoreline that lost 13 to 26 feet of land quadrupled the first year after the spill. In the second year after, from 2011 to 2012, the higher land loss rates extended even farther — to areas that hadn’t been as heavily coated.
“Erosion is faster in the heavier oil sites than in the lighter ones,” says Eugene Turner a professor at the department of oceanography and coastal sciences at Louisiana State University, who was not involved in the research. “It’s a before and after comparison.”
Restoration projects that include restoring sediments and planting new vegetation have been going on since the 1990s. But even with those efforts, erosion is continuing. And with a leveed Mississippi river that cuts off the natural flux of sediments, there’s little to do to solve the situation, says Jones at JPL. “So in this area, when erosion happens, you’re just very unlikely to reform any land that’s eroded, especially at this rate,” she says.
The land loss is fairly easy to notice, too, according to Overton at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. He says that in the marshes affected by the oil spill, it’s fairly common to spot plastic poles stuck 10 feet in the open water. Those poles were put by researchers during the Deepwater Horizon crisis to mark places where research was taking place. When those poles were placed six years ago, however, they’d been placed on land.
Go Speed Racer on Wed, 23rd Nov 2016 8:10 pm
How can Trump make America great again,
if America keeps disappearing into the ocean?
rockman on Thu, 24th Nov 2016 10:01 am
FYI – Nothing a President-elect Trump or anyone else can do to prevent the shoreline loss in this portion of the state. And that includes if one could completely prevent shoreline erosion (which no one can do): the subsidence that has been ongoing for more the 70 million years will continue moving the shoreline further inland. The are sediments 30,000′ under Barataria Bay that were deposited in 6″ of water. And eventually the current shoreline sediments will also end up thousands of feet below sea level.
And “people” didn’t build the levees that are preventing the Mississippi River from replenishing the shoreline: the US govt built and maintains those levees.
Shortend on Thu, 24th Nov 2016 11:47 am
They say that large south american water rodent is causing mass scale erosion
Climate change’s stronger storms are beating away at the fragile coastline, and the oil and gas industries are scarring the skyline while luring younger generations away from the local farming and fishing way of life. As if that weren’t enough, 20-pound, semi-aquatic rodents, called nutria, which are native to Argentina, are taking over the marshes, devouring the native plants that hold the soil in place, and causing massive coastal erosion
Nutria are something like a cross between a beaver and a New York sewer rat. They were first brought to Louisiana in the 1930s in order to be farmed for their fur, which was growing in popularity. No one knows exactly how they escaped into the wild. Maybe someone let them go when the fur industry was failing, or perhaps it was the work of a hurricane that tore apart a barn they were being kept in. One way or another, they escaped into the swamps and have just gone crazy. This part of Louisiana is just like a big playground for them. And they can breed within months of being born and have multiple litters a year. There are now about five million nutria in this part of Louisiana. There are nutria in other parts of the country, as well, but nowhere have they made themselves quite so much at home as in Louisiana. That’s great for nutria, I guess, but they eat everything that grows, and without plants holding the soil in place, it is eroding away at record speeds—about 40 square miles per year, for several decades now.
Apneaman on Thu, 24th Nov 2016 1:11 pm
rockman do you not realize how blatant and pathetic your fossil fuel shilling is? Maybe those MS meds are polluting your brain and impairing your judgment or maybe you are just pure asshole? The cancer industry has carved the shit out of that area and “people” built levees there long before the US gov ever did.
Apneaman on Thu, 24th Nov 2016 1:22 pm
rockman, 70 million years of subsistence and nature just decided all on her own to speed up the land loos by orders of magnitude 5 minutes after the cancer industry started digging all those canals and disturbing the shit out of the place all around. It’s just another coincidence like Oklahoma becoming the earthquake capital of America shortly after WW injection increased big time. The benign energy providers are completly innocent…………………again.
Losing Ground: Southeast Louisiana Is Disappearing, Quickly
A football field–sized area of land is being washed away every hour, and lawsuits are being filed to hold oil and gas companies responsible for the destruction
“In just 80 years, some 2,000 square miles of its coastal landscape have turned to open water, wiping places off maps……”
“The story of how that happened is a tale of levees, oil wells and canals leading to destruction on a scale almost too big to comprehend — and perhaps too late to rebuild. It includes chapters on ignorance, unintended consequences and disregard for scientific warnings. It’s a story that is still unfolding.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/losing-ground-southeast-louisiana-is-disappearing-quickly/
You’re a lying sack of shit rockman. Go fuck yourself Cancerman.
Apneaman on Thu, 24th Nov 2016 1:28 pm
Wetland shoreline recession in the Mississippi River Delta from petroleum oiling and cyclonic storms
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL070624/abstract
DMyers on Thu, 24th Nov 2016 5:50 pm
I found the question raised above about whether the “people” built the levees, or did the government, to be one of interest. The idea of using levees for flood control strikes me as lame-brained. For that reason alone, the likelihood of government origins increases. Aside from that, these levees must face and oppose the flow of the river. They would have to be built with materials and in such a manner as to divert or impede the Mississippi River. This would imply an investment which few “people” could undertake.
I found a more historical rendition of this subject on the following site: http://www.msleveeboard.com/index.php/about/history.
Read for yourself. Seems the government has underwritten the levee systems, and there was a national act passed to fund this. The Army Corps of Engineers is heavily involved in this top-down system, which at the bottom is executed by local commissions, which are political, if not governmental entities.
makati1 on Thu, 24th Nov 2016 6:54 pm
DH, the government did a good job of fake levees prior to Katrina, didn’t it? They didn’t last long. Your above ref’d article is government bullshit.
Many civilizations controlled and used rivers all over the world for the last 5,000+ years. Learn your history. Then come back with an educated rebuttal, NOT ref’ing U$ government propaganda.
A levee is not a one time “build it and forget it” project. It is a huge, expensive, ongoing building and maintenance project. Something American government engineers seem to forget, or ignore until it is too late.
DerHundIstLos on Fri, 25th Nov 2016 10:56 pm
To make matters worse, the federal government actually encourages people to build homes and industry in flood plain areas. The National Flood Plan provides inexpensive flood insurance despite the risks. It has no become a racket to build in areas frequented by flood, then just wait for the checks to arrive from the US Treasury. Real estate developers and other interested parties make elimination of this massive money losing venture improbable.