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First hints at changing perceptions
Our on-going public opinion polling of beach goers in the wake of the Refugio Oil Spill is beginning to show some interesting patterns. We are still in the midst of collecting data (check back in a week or two when we have had a chance to fully explore this data coming in daily), but a… Read more »
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This Toxic Tar
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 »
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KCRW Covers Our Team
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.
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LA Beaches pretty clean
Note: this is a field posting from a Mobil device, please excuse errors. This post will be cleaned up this evening. We have been getting to our more routine survey sites in Los Angeles County over the past few days. We have seen no evidence of more recent tarring. Generally the beaches in LA… Read more »
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Our ROVs: Prowling for Oil
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 »
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Exxon: Drive rather than Pipe
One of the many policy consequences of the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil was a strong regulator of oil drilling and transportation at the county level in Santa Barbara County. Santa Barbara County’s Planning and Development Department’s powerful Energy Division is an amazingly strong office with a suite of powerful permitting and oversight tools across oil… Read more »
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OpenROV Live Posting
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
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Ormond Beach Tar
We sampled our two beach sites at Ormond Beach yesterday. As with our beaches in west Ventura County, we found a generally light to moderate tarring along the strand line. It was consistently patchy with the majority of the beach being only lightly tarred. We did also detect an oily sheen within the sand… Read more »
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It keeps coming…
Now we are seeing additional tar balls in Long Beach (in southern Los Angeles County). This tarring pattern has become all too familiar. We think we are done with the oil “rain,” then we get a highly patchy deposition event which tars beaches with moderate to light tar balls (and occasionally an oil sheen). The… Read more »
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Da Grunion be here!
June 2nd and 3rd are the peak spawning days of the year for our California grunion in 2015. These fish are laying eggs and sperm as I type this into some of our newly tarred high tide lines across SoCal.