Marnie Winter remembers seeing the oil spread through the waters of Barataria Bay in southeastern Louisiana. It was 2010, just a few weeks after an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico began the largest marine oil spill in US history. About 4 million barrels of oil were poured into the sea, affecting more than 1,300 miles of shoreline from Texas to Florida.
“It was scary,” says Winter, who’s the assistant director of the environmental department at Jefferson parish, one of the three parishes surrounding Barataria Bay. She and other local officials began working with the Coast Guard to keep the oil from reaching the shore, but despite their efforts, the oil began coating the Louisiana marshlands. “It was no surprise that the vegetation would die,” Winter says.
Those plants and their roots, however, had been keeping the land from eroding. After the oil spill killed the plants, the marshlands lost a lot of land — especially in the shoreline areas that were heavily coated, according to a new study published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. That’s bad news for an area that’s already badly affected by land erosion. “It’s a big deal,” says Edward Overton, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, who was not involved in the study. “The land that’s lost basically is lost. There’s almost no way to get it back.”
Plants affected by the oil spill in 2010
Marnie Winter
The Louisiana wetlands are important for a variety of reasons. They’re home to many bird, mammal, and fish species. They purify water by filtering pollution and trapping sediment. They absorb carbon from the atmosphere and function as storm buffers, protecting people who live inland from flooding during storms. Finally, fishermen depend on wetlands to harvest oysters, shrimp, crabs, and fish.