
The rate of oil drilling in the U.S. leveled off in 2013, but the same can't be said for the amount of spills that took place.
According to a report from E&E Publishing, there were at least 7,662 spills, blowouts, leaks and similar incidents last year in 15 of the top states for onshore oil and gas activity. In states where the publication could compare results for both years, the publication determined there were about 20 more spills per day than in 2012.
While most of the spills were small, they amounted to more than 26 million gallons of oil, fracking wastewater and more. That's equivalent to the amount of oil BP gushed into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
No all-encompassing list of U.S. oil spills exist, so E&E had to analyze results from different states. The trouble there is that not all states keep track and some simply didn't make good on the publication's request for data. For instance, Mike Soraghan writes that Louisiana referred E&E to the U.S. Coast Guard's National Response Center, but the database is shut down. The group also did not respond to a Freedom of Information Act request from March.
North Dakota, Montana Pennsylvania and Texas were among the states with the largest increases. Production-related spills more than doubled to 103 in Ohio, but that figure is tiny compared to other states.
"We still have this mentality that we have to go faster and faster," said Don Morrison of the Dakota Resource Council, an environmental group that monitors activity in the Bakken formation. "When you're rushing, things go wrong."
In some states, the spill increases have led to more enforcement, while that's not the case in others. Notices of alleged violations increased by 50 percent in Colorado. Since 2010, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources tripled the number of workers who deal with oil and gas to more than 100. That includes 50 inspectors.
In Texas, officials issued one-third more noncompliance shutdown threats than in 2012. However, an agency spokeswoman told E&E that most of that bump arose from delinquent reports. The actual number of enforcement penalties that were assessed dropped by 40 percent.
In addition to the analysis, Soraghan got a commitment from Continental Resources Inc., the largest operator in the Bakken formation, to reduce spills, maintain spill prevention teams and take "appropriate action" against contractors who don't make an improvement. Examples include steel-lined containment systems and emergency shutdown systems at well sites.
"All these enhancements are part of our drive to continuously improve," said Tom Oddie, vice president of health, safety, security and environment for Continental.
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
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Noreen Nunez lives in a middle-class neighborhood that rises up a hillside in Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region.