For 33 Years, Alaskans Have Been Capturing Images of This Volkswagen Beetle-Sized Boulder – But Why? | Science

Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems, presents this article. Find more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

David Janka commands the Auklet, a 59-foot charter boat that has traveled Alaska’s waters longer than the region has been an American state. During peak summer, Janka steers into Snug Harbor, a shallow curve in a shoreline of Knight Island that is walled by towering cliffs and stands of cedar, spruce, and hemlock. He heads for a potato-shaped rock the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. He is here to photograph it.

For 33 years, someone has traveled here each summer to photograph the unassuming boulder, nicknamed Mearns Rock. Together, the photos are an unexpected offshoot of one of the United States’ worst environmental disasters.

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground on Bligh Reef, dumping more than ten million gallons of thick black crude into Prince William Sound. Oil flooded Snug Harbor, which was 50 miles away, along with Mearns Rock and all its marine denizens. Alan Mearns, the rock’s namesake, who worked on the hazmat team for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the spill’s aftermath, confirmed that it was “totally painted in oil.”

During the cleanup, some sections of the coast were power washed, and others were left untreated. Mearns Rock remained oiled. For the next decade, Mearns and a team of chemists and biologists returned to dozens of sites in the region to assess the ecosystem’s recovery from oil exposure and power washing. Mearns began photographing these research visits, using boulders like Mearns Rock as landmarks. When the larger study ended, Mearns and his NOAA colleague John Whitney secured funding to keep taking yearly photos until 2012. Since then, the project has relied on volunteers like Janka, who now consistently photograph eight of the original sites, stopping in when they’re nearby. The dedicated group has included skippers, scientists, and local coast guard volunteers.

Side by side, the 33 images of Mearns Rock look like a collection of a child’s yearly school photos. Together, the photos demonstrate the dynamism of the intertidal zone, where mussels, barnacles, and seaweed vie for real estate.

“There’s a great deal that we can learn from a simple picture,” says Scott Pegau, a research manager at the Oil Spill Recovery Institute in Cordova, Alaska. This June, during an aerial herring survey, he will dock his floatplane in Shelter Bay, 12 miles southwest of Snug Harbor, to photograph two refrigerator-sized boulders named Bert and Ernie.

The 33-year photo series is also helping researchers understand the region’s natural variability, where the intertidal zone changes from boulder to boulder, bay to bay, year to year.

While mussels and barnacles rebounded to natural numbers within a few years of the spill, other species have not been as lucky. Some populations have still not recovered, including a local killer whale pod. To this day, when Janka has guests on the Auklet, he can stop at certain beaches and find pockets of toxic oil just a spoonful of sand beneath the surface.

Janka has been intimately familiar with the oil spill since the night of the Exxon Valdez wreck. During the five frenzied days after the spill, he shuttled journalists into the disaster zone, and he met Mearns when NOAA later hired him to ferry scientists to their sites. Although he retired from chartering this year, Janka plans to return to Mearns Rock to snap another photo this summer.

The Exxon Valdez showed Janka the power of visual documentation. Many positive things happened because images of the spill were passed around the world, he says. The US government implemented oil spill legislation, formed citizen councils to oversee Prince William Sound’s oil industry, and legislated double-hulled tankers. “I don’t think that would have happened if there weren’t photographs,” he says.

The ongoing project feels less attached to the 1989 oil spill and more focused on the future, says Mearns, who retired from NOAA in 2018 but continues to oversee the photo collection. Prince William Sound has made a tentative recovery but could be devastated again. Alaska’s waters are warming, new species are moving north, and rising seas are pushing the intertidal zone up the shoreline. A citizen council recently flagged the Valdez oil terminal in Prince William Sound as an “unacceptable safety risk.” Who knows what the next 33 years will bring? The team is actively searching for volunteer photographers to keep the project alive.

“I turn 80 this summer. I keep thinking, well, maybe I should back off. But I can’t. It’s fun,” Mearns says. As long as his friends keep sending photos, he’ll keep building the boulder albums, checking out each rock’s latest look as he adds another photo to the end of the line.

This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems.

 

 

 

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Denial of responsibility! TechCodex is an automatic aggregator of Global media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, and all materials to their authors. For any complaint, please reach us at – [email protected]. We will take necessary action within 24 hours.