Deep-Sea Corals: Widespread Stress
Photograph by Charles Fisher, PSU
As the Deepwater Horizon
disaster unfolded, images of oiled birds and slick coastlines made
headlines while the fate of seafloor ecosystems remained hidden beneath
the waves.
But recent research has provided compelling evidence of the spill's impact on deep sea corals,
seen clearly in the specimen above, which is now likely dead despite
the orange branch tips. "Because of the magnitude of this spill, and
because of the fact that it happened so deep, rather than at the
surface, it had significant impacts on these biological communities
that we've just been beginning to understand," said Haverford College
geochemist
Helen White.
White
was lead author on one of the first studies ever to explore the
impacts of an oil spill on deep-sea ecosystems, which are separated
from the brunt of a typical oil tanker spill by thousands of feet of
water.
White and colleagues used a fleet of underwater vehicles
to examine distressed Gulf of Mexico corals that Pennsylvania State
University's Charles Fisher, the team's science leader, had spotted
back in 2010—three months after the leaking Macondo well had been
capped. White also employed two-dimensional gas chromatography
techniques that fingerprinted the oil residue found on the reefs to the
Macondo well some 7 miles (11 kilometers) to the northeast.
"Parts
of the corals that had a heavy covering of brown, flocculent material
had died when we went back a month later while other parts that had
lighter coatings exhibited some signs of recovery," White explained.
"Will these coral communities rebound? If so how? Right now we just
don't know." Ongoing work will provide vital information about how
corals cope with oil from both catastrophic events and natural seeps.
—Brian Handwerk
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