Ian Snape Interview - Special Topic of Oil Spills
Special Topic of Oil Spills Interview, February 2011
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As fuel and water flow through the soil, they enter the barrier. In the middle of the barrier we capture the hydrocarbons because the nutrient conditions are adjusted to be just right for bioremediation in that active zone. And any nutrients that are not consumed by the organisms will then get taken up in the next zone. So the whole thing acts as a big filter that allows water to pass through the barriers while capturing the hydrocarbons and biodegrading them. That's part of our recent research focus.
We're also looking at the effects of thin films of water that remain unfrozen even at temperatures below zero degrees, and how these affect the toxicity of fuel in the soil and the potential for biodegradation. And then we're working on the toxicology of fuel, trying to answer the question of how much fuel is too much. In other words, what should we clean up and when should we stop? When is it clean enough?
What has proven to be the most challenging part of this Antarctic research?
Time. We have a very narrow window to be able to test things. The soil only thaws for six to eight weeks of the year, so we have to get our team mobilized, get down there, establish some experiment, set it up, and then wait 12 months before we can see what happened. And because there are only these narrow windows when the ground is thawed, it can take many years before we can evaluate how effective the experiment has been. We have experiments that take five years or more to get a result.
On top of that, the planning and approval process might take two years. The experiment runs for five. We get results in another year. Some experiments can take eight years to run to fruition. I have one experiment, in which I collected the samples around four years ago and I'm only just now analyzing them. I don't anticipate publishing anything from it for another two years. Meanwhile, the logistics involved is millions of dollars.
Do your funding agents have the patience for this kind of long-term research?
"There are many tens of thousands of cubic meters of petroleum-contaminated soil in Antarctica."
You just have to be aware of the funding situation and play a number of different games to keep going. You have to do some experiments that give immediate results, some that give results after a few years, and some that go long-term. You have to have a portfolio of work, in effect, that delivers results in different time frames. We've been very fortunate, though. We've been well-supported by the government and we've positioned ourselves well for the future.
Your most-cited paper of the last decade appears to be from Polar Record in 2001—"Management and remediation of contaminated sites at Casey Station, Antarctica"—although it's not in our database because we didn't start covering Polar Record until 2004. Tell us about this research and what you were reporting.
This was a synthesis paper of management, site assessment, and bioremediation chemistry. A lot of people worked on that. It was probably the most rewarding research I ever did, even though we published it in what was a relatively obscure journal at the time, because it provided the scientific underpinning for a multi-million dollar clean-up program. It was really used to build the case for why we should clean up in Antarctica.
We had a fairly large team evaluating contaminated sites in Antarctica for the first time in a really comprehensive way. And we pulled all this research together to make the case for remediation of contaminants in Antarctica.
Was Casey Station, the site of the remediation project, particularly contaminated? Is that why you used it?
It was a good example to use because many of the typical problems found throughout the Antarctic could be found at Casey. The waste disposal site, for example, was placed in a water course, in a stream. The sort of contaminants found there were old batteries, fuel drums, building materials, food scraps, all sorts of stuff, all thrown in a low-lying depression and abandoned. That was the typical waste management strategy 20 to 30 years ago. It wasn't really until the late 1980s that people started managing their waste much more tightly and recognizing that this wasn't such a smart thing to do.
Has the Casey Station site been cleaned up entirely?
It's mostly been cleaned up. What's left has been scheduled for removal. It's an on-going process. There are other contaminated sites in the region that we're still investigating or remediating. We're currently doing full-scale remediation on six terrestrial fuel spills both in the Antarctic and the sub-Antarctic.
"...if we can understand the underlying mechanisms for how things move or degrade, what those processes are, we can best design low-cost, sensible interventions."
The Casey Station remediation project was the first one that was fully monitored throughout the process. It's the first thorough clean-up. Other nations have done some remediation projects, but this is the first in which we had a dedicated science program looking at the effects of cleaning up as well as the impacts.
What would you like to convey to the general public about your research and what you've learned in the dozen years you've been working in Antarctica?
That Antarctica is a vast continent. It's enormous, but less than 0.05 percent of that vast continent is terrestrial rocky oases that are within, say, five kilometers of the coast. So when we think of this vast continent, most of it is covered in ice and snow except for these little rocky outposts around the coast. These are where the wildlife and biodiversity hotspots are. They're also the places that humans inhabit, which means this is where the main impacts are—around the stations and where the people go.
So if I have one message, that would be that the Antarctic is a big place, but the habitats we most care about are actually very, very rare and our impact in those areas is significant. The impact of contamination in these rare habitats is something to be concerned about, and we should take our environmental stewardship of these areas very seriously.
If you had an unlimited sum of money to do a single experiment—if money was no object—what would you do?
If you think outside the box, we're actually already doing that experiment. We have a seemingly unlimited supply of money going into industry that puts carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. It's the biggest, most profound human experiment on the planet, and the actual investment in the experiment itself seems almost unlimited. The really interesting part is to see how the globe and how humans respond to that.
To give you perspective, I think our work done on contaminants in the Antarctic has been important, but I think understanding climate change and the effects of climate change are many orders of magnitude more important. There's no doubt that the impact of climate change on the Antarctic environment will be absolutely enormous.
I can't tell you exactly what it will be because there's so much uncertainty there. I have no doubt in my mind, though, that human-induced climate change is real, that it is having an impact right now and will have a very profound impact in the future.
Ian Snape, B.Sc., Ph.D.
Australian Antarctic Division
Kingston, Tasmania
Australia
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KEYWORDS: ANTARCTIC, CONTAMINATED SITES, INTERACTIONS, IMPACTS, RISKS, PREDICTIONS, REMEDIATION, TERRESTRIAL, NEAR SHORE, MARINE, SOUTHERN OCEAN, ICE, ATMOSPHERIC CLIMATE, CLIMATE CHANGE, POLICY, FUEL, FUEL TRANSFER, MARINE SPILL, MINERALIZATION, HYDROCARBONS, PETROLEUM, BIOREMEDIATION, LOW TEMPERATURES, NITROGEN, PERMEABLE REACTIVE BARRIERS, SEQUENCED BARRIERS, FUEL TOXICOLOGY, EXPERIMENT DURATION, FUNDING, CASEY STATION, WASTE MANAGEMENT, BIODIVERSITY HOTSPOTS.