Comparison of the Spatial Extent, Impacts to Shorelines, and Ecosystem and Four-Dimensional Characteristics of Simulated Oil Spills

The ever-growing increase in deep-sea oil explorations in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) has been raising concerns with regard to future oil spills. Major oil spills in the GoM such as the Deepwater Horizon (DWH 2010) and the Ixtoc 1 (1979) resulted in extensive pollution of the pelagic, sea-floor, and coastal ecosystems. Oil spill transport and fate models are effective tools which allow a spatiotemporally explicit reconstruction of oil spills, while accounting for key processes such as evaporation, sedimentation, biodegradation, and dissolution. Oil transport data can be fed into an ecosystem model to help estimate system-scale changes in biodiversity and impacts on the delivery of ecosystem services. The increase in deep-sea oil-drilling endeavors warrants an evaluation of the potential outcomes and effects of oil spills. However, each spill scenario is a complex 4-D problem, spanning over wide spatiotemporal dimensions, affecting various media (water, sediments, coast, air); hence it is difficult to effectively evaluate the differences between various oil spill scenarios.