Dr Jane Lubchenco is one of the "most highly cited" and much decorated marine ecologists in the world. Prior to joining the Obama administration as chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2009, Lubchenco was known for her outspokenness and strong advocacy for better communication between scientists and the public regarding critical scientific issues. Lubchenco co-founded three organizations – The Leopold Leadership Program, the Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea (COMPASS), and Climate Central – that aim to communicate scientific knowledge to the public, policy makers, media and industry.
What’s the best science NOAA has on the current status of the oil spill? What are the continuing risks in the Gulf right now as a result of that?
We don’t yet have a full complete picture of the impact of the oil spill and that will take many, many years to come. We are already beginning to see some things coming back, but we are probably in for a lot of surprises. We just simply won’t know for long-lived species, what the true impact was for quite a few years. Our particular concern is with vulnerable young stages like larvae, or juvenile stages for long-living fish like blue fin tuna or turtles. It just takes many, many years to get a picture of what the impact was. So ‘stay tuned’ is I guess the sort of bottom line for that.
On how much oil is left, we believe there’s still some residual oil but it’s pretty miniscule in terms of the vast amount of it. There’s some in tar balls around the coastal margins that will continue to get re-suspended when there are storms. There’s some oil in the sea floor, especially right around the wellhead, but it’s certainly the case that the vast majority of the oil has been either biodegraded or was recovered by the recovery effort.
The people who were affected by the spill continue to have their lives be seriously impaired. The economies, businesses, are only beginning to come back in many cases and it will be a long time before they are fully recovered. So as we thing about the spill it’s both ecosystems themselves as well as the people that are dependent on them. And it just took a very serious toll on both of those.
Read the complete interview from Earth Island Journal