ABSTRACT
Despite over 40 years of research and efforts to improve the transportation of oil, oil spills continue to affect coastal areas around the world. This chapter discusses the physics and chemistry of oil spills and details the major effects of an oil spill on organisms, populations, and ecosystems. While the immediate effects of a spill can be extremely severe locally, oil is not the most toxic long-term pollutant of the marine environment, and bacteria will use oil as a carbon source, eventually breaking down almost all oil constituents. Unfortunately, this natural clean-up process can take a long time (years to decades), when our social requirement is for clean-up to occur within a matter of days. As a result, several different technologies with varying degrees of effectiveness have been developed to increase the rate at which oil spills can be cleaned up. These are discussed here, along with a standard, basic plan for combating an oil spill, whether in the open ocean or on the shoreline. How remediation methods are deployed depends to a large extent on the substrate that is affected by the oil since a sandy beach has physical and biological characteristics that are very different from those of rocky shores or marshes.
