Oil Spill

A walrus female and pup on an ice floe in the Chukchi Sea, June 2010. Photo: Sarah Sonsthagen/USGS
 
Oceanographers Sylvia Earl and Paul Dayton think it’s a bad idea, as do more than 500 other scientists and numerous environmental groups: energy development in the remote, often ice-choked waters off northern Alaska.
 
It’s a sentiment Audubon shares, and the organization has made it super easy for you to make your voice heard: Click here to tell the Interior Department the Arctic Ocean should be off-limits to drilling. Hurry—the deadline is 11 a.m. Eastern tomorrow, February 8.

President rides a ferry from Dauphin Island, Ala., to Fort Morgan, Ala., past a natural gas rig in 2010. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

Just days after the President tackled natural gas, oil, and the environment in his State of the Union address, the Obama administration today laid out his “Blueprint to Make The Most of America’s Energy Resources."

The President will travel west to promote the plan, starting the day at a UPS facility in Las Vegas, a White House press release states, to discuss the importance of America’s workforce in increasing the country’s homemade energy. The President will then travel to Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colorado, to further discuss his administration’s plans to promote energy security.

In an update to our post on the oil-afflicted penguins of New Zealand, we’re happy to share that as of today, 94 little blue penguins have been released to their now-clean habitat. Check out the video to watch these happy little guys hurry home!

Photo: Chris Turner

The ongoing and devastating New Zealand oil spill has imperiled little blue penguins and only do-gooders doing their darndest can help!

Piping Plover © Erik Johnson

A light west breeze stirs thick, salty air. At barely eight o’clock, the day’s heat has begun to build already. Swallows flicker over the beach in scores, heading into the wind, and down by the listless sea, in ones and threes, mill Willets and Piping Plovers newly arrived from far away in the continent’s interior, and Sanderlings from farther still, high in the Arctic, where some had been down-covered chicks only weeks before.

Photo: Kim Hubbard, for Audubon magazine

Last year’s massive oil spill may have fallen from the front pages, but it’s still top of mind for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As part of its Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration, the agency continues to crunch numbers and conduct research to determine closer-to-real consequences of one of the nation’s worst environmental calamities.

Hence the start of a three-part USFWS study, funded by BP, that looks at how far and to where an oiled carcass may drift, how long the carcass lasts once it comes ashore, and how efficient it is to survey beaches for dead animals. The end goal: To figure out how many birds the Gulf Oil Spill actually killed.

From left: Eva Yean, Juliet Falchi, and Jennifer Ritter.

Jennifer Ritter couldn’t just sit around, idly fretting after she heard about the Deepwater Horizon well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. After commiserating with her friend Eva Yean, she called another sympathetic pal, Juliet Falchi. The three decided to do their part by hosting a fundraiser for relief efforts.

Lesser scaups (Photo: TexasEagle, Flickr Creative Commons)

“Strictly speaking, on behalf of waterfowl and ducks, things worked out OK. We did dodge a bullet,” says Tom Moorman, Ducks Unlimited’s director of conservation planning in the southern region.

Of course, despite a year having passed, still much is unknown about the oil spill’s total effect on the Gulf and its wildlife inhabitants.

Photo by Carolyn Cole of the Los Angeles Times

As oil bubbled to the ocean’s surface last year, it swept across the Gulf of Mexico into areas crucial to sea turtles that forage and nest in the basin. Now researchers are starting to assess the oil’s affect on the species.

It may be safe for us to eat Gulf seafood such as blue crab, brown and white shrimp, and oysters, but what about the shellfish's own health?