This isn't a scientific study indicating all is well but good news is so sparse that it's nice to read that oxygen and some life is returning in places where there was none last year.
MOBILE, Alabama -- A year ago, at the height of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, much of the seafloor off the Alabama coast was dead.
Fish carcasses littered the sand in 60 feet of water.
Barnacles and oysters clinging to underwater structures were dead. There were no crabs. No urchins. No starfish. Nothing living whatsoever.
Scientists blamed a huge plume of low oxygen water that pushed in from the depths far offshore. Some speculated at the time that a massive bloom of microscopic bacteria might have consumed the oxygen during an oil-fueled feeding frenzy.
Whatever the cause, things look much different now.
Several times this spring, including as recently as last week, the Press-Register returned to 3 natural gas platforms visited during the summer of 2010. Instead of swimming through a dead sea and finding oxygen levels far below the threshold required to support marine animals, there was abundant life.
Spiny black urchins the size of a baseball clung to the steel legs of the platforms. Schools of spadefish, sardines, red snapper and amberjack swam around the superstructure in lazy circles. Tesselated blennies — a small, wildly colorful fish that apparently hitchhiked into the Gulf aboard drilling rigs in the 1990s — darted in and out of empty barnacles.
Down in the depths, hi hats and ruby red lips, both small fish that swarm around underwater structure, were plentiful.
In every direction, the tube-like burrows of various marine worms protruded from the seafloor like tiny periscopes.
Press-Register tests shows water rich in oxygen
Using a portable oxygen meter, the newspaper tested the water in June found and found it rich in oxygen from the surface to the seafloor. That was a stark contrast to identical testing the previous year, when the newspaper measured dissolved oxygen at about a tenth of what is required by marine life.
Monty Graham, who heads the Marine Science Department at the University of Southern Mississippi, monitored oxygen levels throughout the spill, and in the months since, with a team from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. The group sampled water off Alabama as recently as Wednesday.
“We haven’t seen low oxygen offshore like we saw last year during the spill. Offshore, the (oxygen levels) have been good,” Graham said.
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Last year, Graham and other scientists said that creatures that could move away from the low oxygen water — crabs, fish, shrimp — had done so. Stationary critters, including oysters, barnacles and worms burrowed into the seafloor, had simply died. The scientists predicted that the areas affected by the low oxygen would be recolonized. The question, they said, was how long that would take.
Many marine creatures — barnacles, worms, crabs, shrimp, fish and more — reproduce by releasing fertilized eggs adrift on ocean currents. Eggs and larvae drifting into the areas affected by last year’s low oxygen event would find a ready home this summer, scientists said.
It appears that in the area off Alabama, that recolonization is already well underway.
