What Happens to Florida

Will the oil hit the Florida coastline, and more specifically, the three million acres of wetlands that make up the Everglades, home to hundreds of bird and animal species, plus crucial coral reef, mangrove and seagrass ecosystems, a place National Audubon has worked for the past century to preserve? 

 

“Whether or not oil makes landfall anywhere [in Florida] will depend on what the winds are doing at that particular point in time,” said Robert Weisberg, a physical oceanographer and modeler from the University of South Florida, during a recent press briefing. That seems the standard answer to this question, no matter the locale because truth is, no one knows for sure where the oil will wind up.

 

Weisberg can make educated guesses based on projection models. However, those models only look a few days out. What Weisberg will say is that once the oil interacts with the loop current—a large current off of Florida’s coast that feeds into the Gulf stream—it will only take a week for oil to reach the entrance to the Florida straits. A week after that, Miami could see oil. “Exactly when oil will enter the loop current at the surface is unknown,” he said. “But it appears to be imminent. What that means, I really can’t tell you. It could be days, it could be longer.”

 

Three other scientists on that same press briefing did answer how oil could affect coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass:

 

Richard Dodge, a coral reef biologist at Nova Southeastern and director of the National Coral Reef Institute, started off with an impressive stat from NOAA: 84 percent of the coral reef systems in the U.S. are in Florida. “This is potentially very important impact we’re looking at,” he said.

Typically, coral reefs, which are both plant and animal, affix to the ocean floor, making it easier for them to avoid oil slicks on the water’s surface. But their relative safety also depends on “the severity, the duration and the frequency of the exposure to the oil,” Dodge added. Plus, any oil that dissolves in the water will likely generate toxic chemicals that could float down toward the reefs.

 

On top of that, the chemical dispersants—436,000 gallons of which have so far been used, according to the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command—are extremely detrimental to coral reefs. “If oil spills are in the vicinity of a coral reef, the method of choice to contain the oil is not dispersant,” Dodge warned. “They’ve been shown to have severe effects.”

 

The health of the Everglades depends on the productivity of its mangrove ecosystem, said Jerry Lorenz, a state research director at Audubon of Florida. “If the oil slick were to enter a mangrove ecosystem…it would basically blanket the entire surface of the wetland, which will destroy the productivity of the wetland,” he said. “Once it’s in there, it really can’t be cleaned back out. It would take years, if not decades to get the oil out of the system.”

 

That could mean problems for roseate spoonbills, ospreys, all the heron species, pelicans and terns, not to mention the red fish, snook, snapper, and sea trout that all depend on the mangrove ecosystem for survival.

 

And don’t let the fact that mangroves grow into the air fool you; they’re not protected from the oil, according to James Fourqurean, a marine ecologist from Florida

International University. “Mangrove roots are down in the coastal sediments that have no oxygen in them at all,” he said. “They require auxiliary structure to reach up into the atmosphere to get air for their roots.” An oil blockade could essentially suffocate the trees.

 

Seagrass, flowering plants that live at the bottom of the ocean, provide food for many fish and other animal species in southern Florida. Oil reaching the area could affect 18,000 square kilometers of the state’s seagrass, which are distributed from Cape Romano, around the Dry Tortugas, all the way up the Florida Keys, Fourqurean said.

 

There’s bad news and good news here. First the bad news. The smaller animals that depend on the seagrass are particularly susceptible to oil. But “seagrasses themselves seem to be relatively resistant to oil,” Fourqurean said. “The only time the seagrass plants themselves are really drastically harmed by those oil spills are when the oil actually ponds up at low tide at inches deep across the sea grass bed.”