Oil Fates & Effects Brochure

Oil Fates & EffectsCIRCAC’s studies focus on understanding potential impacts by oil industry operations in CookInlet by assessing contaminant loads in Cook Inlet sediments and animal tissues. In order tofully be able to evaluate the potential fate of industry contaminants, an understanding of thebackground and natural sources is also a focus of CIRCAC’s work. Similarly, to understand thefate of discharge plumes or spilled oil, better descriptions and predictions of the circulationpatterns within the Inlet are necessary.CIRCAC has developed its programs to assess all of these aspects of Cook Inlet’s environmentin order to more fully describe potentially impacts from Cook Inlet’s oil industry. The impactassessment work has relied on analyzing for known oil industry contaminants in sediments andanimal tissues throughout the inlet, with organisms at the low end of the food chain (filter anddeposit feeders) acting as sentinels for linking sediment and water contaminants to the foodchain.The physical oceanography data describe circulation patterns and what drives them in CookInlet. For example, how important is the Alaska Coastal Current’s influx into the Inlet in drivingnet circulation in the lower inlet and how do seasonal changes in freshwater input into upperCook Inlet change the net outflow along the west side of Cook Inlet? These questions areimportant to better predict and describe how water currents would carry dissolved contaminantsfrom discharge sources or oil spilled on the surface to potentially sensitive habitats.CIRCAC’s habitat mapping program is another important aspect of a monitoring program sinceit is necessary to know your habitat types in order to design studies to look at environmentalimpacts. 1 / 1