Can we predict the next oil spill catastrophe in the Mediterranean?

    The negative effects of oil spills on marine life, including plankton, fishes, aquatic birds, and mammals, can be devastating and long-lasting. Spilled oil emits toxic volatile chemicals into the atmosphere, fouls shorelines, and destroys commercial fisheries, aquaculture, and shellfish beds.

    Recognizing oil spill occurrence as a fundamentally random process, we carried out extensive Monte Carlo simulations using the Lagrangian MEDSLIK-II model (De Dominicis et al., 2013) to predict the impacts of future oil spill accidents in the Mediterranean.

    A historical HAVEN oil spill (off the Port of Genoa, 1991), known as the largest shipwreck in European waters and one of the most severe oil pollution incidents in the Mediterranean, was utilized for scenario prototyping. For the first time, virtual spills are sampled from contemporary long-term observational data for the entire Mediterranean Sea (Dong et al., 2022). To force MEDSLIK-II, we use the reanalyses provided by the Copernicus Marine Service and atmospheric wind data from ECMWF.

    Over two million simulated spills from 2018 to 2021 allow us to study conditional probability, assuming that a significant accidental oil spill, like the HAVEN disaster, may occur in the future at a specific location in the Mediterranean.

    In the results, we present maps of oil pollution hazard indices in probabilistic terms, statistical estimates of oil arrival time, the percentage of oil beached, and the budget for spilled oil mass.

    The Aegean Sea coastlines are among the most impacted areas, featuring elevated coastal hazard indices, short arrival times with a median value of about 3.1 days, and significant beached oil fractions of approximately 30%. In contrast, the Ionian, Central Mediterranean, and Levantine seas exhibit relatively low hazard indices, longer arrival times, and smaller beached oil percentages associated with the high dissipative properties of these sub-basins.

    The results obtained can be utilized for planning the exploration of offshore oil production fields and minimizing risks in maritime oil transfer activities.

    This work is performed in the framework of the NECCTON project (grant number 101081273).

 

    References

• De Dominicis, M., Pinardi, N., Zodiatis, G., Lardner, R., 2013. MEDSLIK-II, a Lagrangian marine surface oil spill model for short term forecasting–part 1: Theory. Geosci. Model Dev. 6, 1851–1869.
• Dong, Y., Liu, Y., Hu, C., MacDonald, I.R., Lu, Y., 2022. Chronic oiling in global oceans. Science 376, 1300–1304.