Abstract
Accidental oil spills can have significant effect on the coastal and marine environment. As the oil extraction and exploration activities increase in the Barents Sea, it is of increasingly importance to investigate the potential oil spill incidents associated with these activities. In this study, the transport and fate of oil after a proposed oil spill incident in Barents Sea was modelled by oil spill contingency and response model OSCAR. The possibility that the spilled oil reach the open sea and the strand area was calculated respectively. The influence area of the incident was calculated by combining the results from 200 simulations. The possibility that the spilled oil reach Alke species, a vulnerable species and on the National Red List of birds in Barents Sea, was analyzed by combining oil spill modelling results and the Alke species distribution data. The results showed that oil is dominated with a probability of 70-100% in the open sea to reach an area in a radius of 20km from the release location after 14 days of release. The probability reduces with the increasing distances from the release location. It is higher possibility that the spilled oil will reach the Alke species in the strand area than in the open sea in the summer. The total influence area of the release is 11 429 km2 for the surface water and 1528 km2 for the coastal area.
Highlights
Among the different types of marine pollution, oil is a major threat to the sea ecosystems [1]
Probability that oil reach open sea and the strand area at an accidental oil spill in Barents Sea The probability that oil will reach the strand area and the open sea 14 days after the accidental spill is simulated with the OSCAR model
The population distribution of Alke species corresponding to this period dominates in the strand area since Alke reside in the strand during their breeding
Summary
Among the different types of marine pollution, oil is a major threat to the sea ecosystems [1]. Accidental oil spills to the marine environment has received great concern due to their potential impacts on the marine ecosystems and marine activities [1, 2]. The largest accidental oil spill worldwide was a blowout at the Ixtoc-1 well that released 480000 tons crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico over a 10-month period from June 1979 to February 1980 [3]. A total of 12,700 cubic meters of oil suddenly released into the environment in an uncontrolled blowout accident happened in Ekofisk field in 1977 [5], which got high international attention, and became the basis for the strict environmental requirements on the Norwegian continental shelf [6]
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