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

R Eugene Turner; Giovanna McClenachan; Andrew W Tweel

doi:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2016.06.046

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

Mar Pollut Bull. 2016 Sep 15;110(1):316-323. doi: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2016.06.046. Epub 2016 Jun 24.

Authors

R Eugene Turner¹, Giovanna McClenachan², Andrew W Tweel²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, United States. Electronic address: euturne@lsu.edu.
² Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, United States.

PMID: 27349381
DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2016.06.046

Abstract

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 2.5years 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.

Keywords: Erosion; Louisiana; Macondo oil spill; Rookery habitat; Wetland.

MeSH terms

Disasters
Environment*
Gulf of Mexico
Islands
Louisiana
Petroleum Pollution*
Soil
Wetlands*

Substances

Soil