If you ignore the water in this shot for a minute…the scenery along this stretch of the California coastline, west of the city of Santa Barbara, is spectacular. You can probably say that this sunset photo doesn’t even do it justice.
The landscape is shaped by faults, with steep hills and river valleys formed as blocks of crust rotated during the development of the San Andreas fault system.
This location is also hugely important for wildlife. The coast of California is a zone of upwelling in the ocean; deep ocean waters with lots of dissolved components rise up, bringing nutrients to the surface waters and feeding a vibrant ocean ecosystem.
That ocean ecosystem though has led to a negative side; the oil slicks you see on the water today. A series of oilrigs sit off the coastline, extracting hydrocarbons from the sediments deposited offshore. That oil is then piped online just west of Santa Barbara through a pipeline owned by a Texas-based company called Plains All American Pipeline and then heads north to refineries in the central part of the state where it is turned into gasoline.
On Tuesday, the pipeline that carries oil along the coastline ruptured and began leaking. The oil pipeline can carry over 5 million million gallons of oil per day; several hundred thousand gallons of oil move through it per hour.
The rupture was noted by pipeline operators shortly after it started due to a pressure decrease. The operators shut the pipeline down, but pipelines don’t shut down instantly.
The estimate on Tuesday was that just over 20,000 gallons of oil had spilled, the estimate on Wednesday was up to 100,000 gallons of oil with 20,000 gallons reaching the ocean. The exact amount spilled is hard to know since its uncertain exactly when the pipeline ruptured and how long it kept flowing until the pressure was relieved, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see those numbers increase again (eventually an on-site investigation and a legal case will determine a number because in the U.S. fines for oil spills are based on the amount of oil spilled). For comparison, a single tanker truck like those seen on rails or roads in the U.S. typically carries just over 10,000 gallons of oil; this spill therefore is at least 10 tanker trucks worth and possibly more.
Not all the oil has reached the ocean; it took a path down a valley from the pipeline and coated the ground as it went. However, the oil that did reach the ocean is being carried by currents along the coastline, fouling habitats used by all that life and the birds on land that feed on it. Several tourist sites and campgrounds that were gearing up for a holiday weekend are shut down and likely to remain closed for a long time while cleanup is underway.
In the 1960s, a major oil spill in this area was one of the driving forces behind the passage of national environmental protection legislation. The birds and fish in the area obviously aren’t adapted to being “coated in oil”, so just the presence of this oil slick is going to hurt the local ecosystem. A couple percent of the oil has already been recovered and more will be recovered, but the beaches in the area are already sludged.
Some hope might be…since this area does have active oil seeps in it, bacteria might be decently adapted to consume the oil, limiting the impact on the deep ocean. We saw something like that in the Gulf Oil Spill, but because this slick is on the surface it is easier for it to hit the beach and birds in the area as well. Teams of people are already fanning out through the area to try to rescue and clean birds and fish before they’re killed, but you just hate seeing this happen in an ecosystem like this one.
Image credit: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters http://bit.ly/1cPg3v0
Read more: http://bit.ly/1FCSdzO http://lat.ms/1R4ApzE (lots of pictures)
