[Southern California Permaculture] What the Oil Spill Off Santa Barbara Is Going to Kill/Gaviota Coast & SB Channel Unique Habitat with Unusual Species

[Margie Bushman, Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/oil-spill-off-santa-barbara-going-kill/

What the Oil Spill Off Santa Barbara Is Going to Kill
WIRED 
<http://www.wired.com/author/neel-patel/>Neel V. 
Patel Date of Publication: 05.22.15. 05.22.15
A man shovels up oil on a section of beach about a mile east of
Click to A man shovels up oil on a section of 
beach about a mile east of Refugio State Beach, 
Calif., Wednesday, May 20, 2015. A broken onshore 
pipeline spewed oil down a storm drain and into 
the ocean for several hours Tuesday before it was 
shut off. Kenneth Song/The News-Press via AP/SANTA MARIA TIMES OUT

On Tuesday, over 100,000 gallons of oil gushed 
onto a nine mile stretch of California coastline. 
A buried pipeline ruptured next to a culvert that 
led to a Santa Barbara beach, sending oil 
straight into the water. Government officials 
have closed both Refugio State Beach and El 
Captain State Beach until next Tuesday; it’s the 
worst oil spill to hit the Santa Barbara 
coastline since 1969, when 4.2 million gallons of 
oil slicked the Pacific and helped trigger the modern environmental movement.

This isn't just any beach. In the Santa Barbara 
Channel, cold water from the north meets warm 
water from the south, carrying a mosaic of 
unusual species. It’s almost Mediterranean, and 
it’s rare. Off California, massive forests of 
kelp­the largest type of marine algae­create 
“this really cool three-dimensional habitat that 
harbors a lot of biodiversity,” says Bob Miller, 
a marine biologist at UC Santa Barbara. The 
seaweed grows up to 130 feet tall and supports 
more than 800 species, including infant fish and 
invertebrates like crabs and snails. Bigger 
marine mammals like sea lions and otters often 
forage for food through the leaves. When kelp 
breaks loose and washes up on shore, arthropods 
and birds eat it. seagulls, terns, and cormorants 
forage the beaches. About 19,000 gray whales 
migrate through the channel this time of 
year­sometimes as close as 100 feet from shore. 
And the rocky intertidal areas harbor sea 
anemones, soft corals, shrimp, muscles, crabs, and small fish.

But oil screws all of that up. It’s viscous, and 
depending on temperature it either oozes everywhere or sticks to everything.

The 14,000 acres of kelp sprawled around the 
coast captures big gobs of oil in the canopies, 
so it settles like a toxic cloud on the algal 
forests. If little animals eat the oil they 
either die, or get eaten by bigger animals, 
spreading the toxic stuff through the food web.
John Ziegler, of Pismo Beach, Calif, part of a group of citizen


Oil that wave action pushes into the rough 
terrain of the rocky intertidal zone gets trapped 
in the natural nooks and small spaces. These 
crannies are partially isolated, ecologically 
speaking­that’s why tidepools are so cool. But it 
also means that when damaged by oil, they can 
take a much longer time to recover than other marine environments.

Bird species face some of the biggest risks. 
Foraging on the beach means running into oil that 
washes up on shore, which is like walking into a 
tar pit. Brown pelicans­which spent almost 50 
years on the the Federal List of Endangered and 
Threatened Wildlife before being removed in 
2009­dive into the water to hunt for fish, which 
means they end up diving headfirst into an oil slick.

Hey, at least the plants and animals down on the 
bottom will be OK, right? Sure! Unless an 
intensely sunny day­like, you know, 
California­warms the oil enough that it sinks. 
That’s what happened after the Exxon Valdez spill 
in Alaska 25 years ago. People are still digging 
crude out of sediment from the ocean floor there.

It’s too early to tell exactly what'll happen off 
Santa Barbara. Ben Halpern, a marine conservation 
researcher at UC Santa Barbara, says the most 
visible short term effect will bird deaths from 
eating oil-related chemicals. “It’s clearly a 
disaster, but it will be relatively contained,” 
he says. “There will be major impact on the local 
scale, but not the regional one.” He predicts 
much of the oil will be cleaned up within a year 
or two, although there will still be pockets of 
oil that subsist for many years afterward.

Because many of these toxins directly affect 
reproductive organs, Miller says to expect a 
decrease in overall population over the next few generations.

On the slightly brighter (albeit ironic) side, UC 
Santa Barbara has a killer marine sciences 
department, and researchers there will be able to 
use the spill to study how oil affects the 
biogeochemistry of marine ecosystems. “The spill 
will actually create opportunities,” Miller says. 
He’s the head of a program funded by NASA and 
NOAA to observe and measure marine biodiversity 
trends in Santa Barbara, and he’s eager to see 
what they can learn from the spill’s aftermath. 
Other researchers might try testing oil-eating 
microbes, or gather data that could help in 
developing new technologies for cleanup crews.

By Thursday night, 17 cleanup vessels managed by 
the company whose pipeline ruptured­Plains All 
American Pipeline­had managed to slurped up just 
about 9,500 gallons. Halpern says he expect the 
majority of the spill to be cleaned up in a few 
weeks, just in time for the last grey whale 
stragglers to make their way through the Santa Barbara Channel.























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