Identification

Title

A decade of declines in toothed whale densities following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Abstract

Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill began in April 2010, a widely spaced passive acoustic monitoring array was deployed in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico to document the impacts of this unprecedentedly large and deep offshore oil spill on oceanic marine mammals. The array was subsequently maintained for over a decade. Here we document decadal density declines for seven of eight monitored species groups, including sperm whales (up to 31%), beaked whales (up to 83%), and small delphinids (up to 43%). Declines were observed both within and outside of the surface oil footprint. Though not conclusively linked to the oil spill, the broad spatial and temporal scale of these declines observed for disparate marine mammal species is consistent with Deepwater Horizon impacts. These declines have exceeded and outlasted post-spill damage assessment predictions, suggesting that the offshore ecosystem impacts of Deepwater Horizon may have been larger than previously thought.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7cn786r

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2024-12-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

<style type="text/css"></style><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10pt;font-style:normal;" data-sheets-root="1">Copyright author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</span>

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata date

2025-07-10T19:56:48.144917

Metadata language