Word: spill
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...brackish oil. The crude can be chemically typed to the Exxon Valdez, and more oil can be found beneath the beach at Death Marsh and at a number of islands around the Sound. "I wouldn't have possibly believed the oil would last this long," says Lindberg. "Studying the spill has been a great learning experience, but if we had known in the years after the spill what we know now, we would have been looking for oil much earlier...
What scientists like Lindberg know now is that the legacy of the Exxon Valdez is still visible - physically, on the beaches of Prince William Sound and in the animal populations in these sensitive waters that have yet to rebound fully. Using funds from the original spill settlement between Exxon and the state of Alaska, scientists from NOAA have carried out major studies that show oil still remains just beneath the surface in many parts of the Sound - close enough for animals to be affected by it. "The oil may not leak out in quantities that are immediately visible, but that...
...random sites at beaches around the Sound and dug about 100 small pits at each site - more than 9,000 in all. They found oil in over half the places they sampled, despite the fact that only 20% of the beaches that had been hit hardest by the spill, like Death Marsh, were included in the study. Altogether, the NOAA scientists estimated that about 20,000 gallons of oil still remained around the Sound, usually buried between 5 in. and 1 ft. below the surface. (See pictures of the world's most polluted places...
Those 20,000 gallons, out of at least 11 million spilled, might not seem like much, and scientists initially assumed that whatever oil was left behind during the original cleanup would eventually break down naturally. But it turns out that crude oil - especially when it is spilled in a cold region like southeastern Alaska - lingers in the environment for years. And as long as the oil is there, it can harm the animals that might come into contact with it. Sea otters, for example - the face of the Valdez spill - dig millions of foraging pits in beaches around the Sound...
...beaches, trying to get a better sense of how much oil might be left and whether it will be possible to finish the cleanup. And there are still other questions that need to be answered. The Sound's valuable commercial herring fishery collapsed completely a few years after the spill - there are just 10,000 tons of the fish left today, down from a peak of 150,000 tons before the accident - and researchers are trying to figure out what impact the oil might have had on the species' decline. "We'll never be able to fully link the herring...