Transcript:

music

The best way to deal with oil spills is to prevent them from happening in the first place. However, given that there have been and probably will continue to be oil spills, we need to accurately assess what their long term impact will be. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

John Farrington is a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

“One thing that has been very frustrating for scientists in studying oil spills is in the early stage, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, we had a very difficult time convincing folks that when the oil spill disappeared, that that was not the end of the story, that the oil was not all gone from the environment. Very careful scientific studies showed that the oil and its impacts could last from months to years to perhaps as long as a decade. The frustration now is that we’ve moved that pendulum away from one end, but many of us feel it’s swung too much in the other direction, that just because we have spilled oil and effects have been documented to last for a year or perhaps as long as a decade, people are now willing to extrapolate that and say that there’s an effect that will last a century or even that the effects will be irrevocable. Most scientists that I know have studied oil spills will not ascribe to that as being a reasonable extrapolation of the data which we have in hand.”

So how long might we reasonably expect an oil spill to impact on its immediate environment?

“It can be anywhere from a year to a decade in terms of the impact and the survival of the oil. Many people would like us to be more precise as a scientific community and we cannot unless we get out and actually study the spill itself.”

We’ll hear more on the aftermath of oil spills in future programs.

Pulse of the Planet is presented by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.

music