Two years ago today (about 18 hours after the initial release), our field teams were onsite at El Capitan State Beach monitoring sandy beach conditions just prior to the arrival of the spreading oil slick from the Plains All American Pipeline break’s epicenter at Refugio State Beach. We’ve learned much over the ensuing two years… Read more »
A few weeks ago saw me up in Simi Valley speaking to folks from young to old about what began last May 19 at Refugio Beach. I always enjoy giving one of our monthly installment of the CSU Channel Islands Library Lecture Series, an array of public lectures held across Ventura County open to all comers. This presentation had… Read more »
Lakey Peterson Bowl Today part our our sandy beach team trekked up to Santa Barbara’s Leadbetter Beach for the second annual Lakey Peterson Keiki Bowl/Leadbetter Classic. This mix between surf competition and camp is a collaboration between pro surfer Lakey Peterson, Santa Barbara surf school Surf Happens, and the Teddy Bear Cancer Foundation. In addition to… Read more »
We are just wrapping up another fantastic three weeks with our annual installment of Project ACCESO’s Summer Institute. This program, funded by the Department of Education, blends CSU Channel Islands undergrads with undergraduate from community colleges across our region. This year, our ESRM team was fortunate to have student researchers from Santa Barbara City College,… Read more »
Spoiler Alert: Our experiments are showing tar balls washing up on our beaches to be toxic to our local sand crabs. If you are looking for that info, scroll to the Tar’s Toxicity heading at bottom of this post. If you want get a brief primer on Ecotoxicology, then start right here… A brief history of poisons: French… Read more »
Larry Perel did a great update on our beach monitoring efforts. We recorded this last week, but he has updated his story with some of our more recent efforts. Check out his story that aired on KCRW yesterday by clicking on the image below.
Note: This is a partial re-post with some modifications from my students’ Aerial and Aquatic Robotic Research Blog. Check out what my students are doing now and have been doing in recent months with these killer new tools here: The AARR PIRatE Lab Blog. Several of them are exhibiting some of our flying and swimming units at the… Read more »
We will attempt to post info about our subsurface trials of our deposited oil surveys here today, assuming we have connectivity. https://openexplorer.com/expedition/refugio/#post-3663017
We are prepping for our first subtidal surveys for tar/crude and to vett our newest OpenROV platforms for rapid spill surveys/response. For more details, please see our AARR blog.
Here is a quick tour of our PIRatE Lab’s lab. We have been getting several requests about our lab and decided to give you a sense of our set-up. We’ve also had lots of questions about oil; what it looks like, what it smells like, and how sticky it is. We have posted our… Read more »
