This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

David Janka stands at the helm of the Auklet, an 18-meter charter boat that’s traveled Alaska’s waters longer than the region has been an American state. It’s the peak of summer as he putters into Snug Harbor, a shallow curve in a shoreline of Knight Island walled by towering cliffs and stands of cedar, spruce, and hemlock. He steers toward the beach, aiming for a potato-shaped rock the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. He’s here to take its picture.

For 33 years, someone has traveled here each summer to photograph the unassuming boulder, nicknamed Mearns Rock. Collectively, 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 40 million liters of thick black crude into Prince William Sound. Oil spread to Snug Harbor, 80 kilometers away. Mearns Rock and all its marine denizens were “totally painted in oil,” says Alan Mearns, the rock’s eponym, who worked on the hazmat team for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the spill’s aftermath.

During the cleanup, Exxon crews and contractors power washed oil off shorelines into the ocean, where it was easier to corral. But the effort also ripped away marine life.

“Our concern immediately became, Is a cleanup going to be worse than leaving the oil on?” says Mearns.

In the end, Exxon washed some sections of the coast and left others untreated. Mearns Rock remained oiled. For the next decade, Mearns and a team of NOAA chemists and biologists returned to dozens of sites in the region to assess the ecosystem’s recovery from oil exposure and power washing. Mearns started 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 survived on the enthusiasm of 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. In one, the boulder boasts a thick topper of rockweed. Another year, it’s buzz-cut bare, followed by a stubbly growth of barnacles the next summer. Together, the photos demonstrate the dynamism of the intertidal zone, where mussels, barnacles, and seaweed clamor for real estate.

“There’s a lot 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’ll dock his floatplane in Shelter Bay, 20 kilometers southwest of Snug Harbor, to photograph two refrigerator-sized boulders named Bert and Ernie.

The decades-long 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, not all species were so lucky. Several populations still haven’t 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. He shuttled journalists into the disaster zone during the five frenzied days after the spill, and he met Mearns when NOAA later hired him to ferry scientists to their sites. Though he retired from chartering this year, Janka plans to return to Mearns Rock to snap another photo this summer.

The Exxon Valdez proved to Janka the power of visual documentation. So 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 steward 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 just 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 looking for volunteer photographers to keep the project running.

“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.

Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified those responsible for cleaning the beaches. Exxon hired the crews that power washed oil off shorelines, not NOAA.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In 1985, the British Antarctic Survey alerted the world that in the atmosphere high above the South Pole a giant hole was forming in the Earth’s protective ozone layer. World leaders swiftly assembled to work out a solution. Two years later, the United Nations agreed to ban the chemicals responsible for eroding the layer of the stratosphere that shields Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Known as the Montreal Protocol agreement, it is still one of the UN’s most widely ratified treaties.

The Montreal Protocol was a win for diplomacy and the stratosphere. But unbeknown to its signatories at the time, the agreement was also an unexpected ward against climate catastrophe. As new research shows, the aptly named ozone-depleting substances (ODSs) that created the hole over Antarctica are also responsible for causing 30 percent of the temperature increase we saw globally from 1955 to 2005.

Michael Sigmond, a climate scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada is the lead author of a new study calculating the greenhouse-trapping potency of ODSs. The substances’ contribution to global warming are, he says, “larger than most people have realized.”

The Montreal Protocol regulates nearly 100 ozone-eating chemicals. Many fall under the umbrella of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), chemicals popularized in the 1930s for use in spray cans, plastic foams, and refrigeration. Compared with the array of toxic, flammable alternatives they replaced, CFCs were seen as wonder chemicals, and by the early 1970s, the world was producing nearly one million tonnes of them each year.

CFCs are inert, so they don’t react with other gases. Instead, they tend to accumulate in the atmosphere and drift wherever the wind takes them, hanging around in the air for 85 years or more. Once they reach the stratosphere, the second layer of Earth’s multilayered atmosphere, CFCs begin to break down. They’re “destroyed by being blasted apart by photons,” explains Dennis Hartmann, a climate scientist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research. That reactive ruckus is what causes the hole in the ozone layer.

In the troposphere—the lowest level of the atmosphere, which fewer photons reach—ODSs act as long-lasting greenhouse gases. Back in 1987, scientists knew ODSs trapped some solar radiation, but they didn’t know how much. Only recently have scientists been putting together the evidence that ODSs are actually one of the most damaging warming agents of the past half century.

The effects of this warming are amplified at the poles. Sigmond and his colleagues’ work shows that if ODSs had never been mass produced—if the concentration in the atmosphere had stayed at 1955 levels—the Arctic today would be at least 55 percent cooler, and there’d be 45 percent more sea ice each September.

ODS production leveled off in the 1990s. But because they’re so long-lived, these gases are still kicking around, and the warming they cause is still increasing. Yet it could have been much worse. By banning ODSs, the Montreal Protocol unintentionally prevented 1 °C of warming by 2050.

With the Montreal Protocol, world leaders rallied around an urgent cause. In the process, we inadvertently phased out the second-largest forcer of global warming. The unanticipated benefits for the global climate, says Susann Tegtmeier, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Saskatchewan who was not involved in the study, “can be considered a very welcome and very positive side effect.”

While it’s taken a lot more negotiation and innovation to begin dislodging the main driver of climate change—carbon dioxide—the Montreal Protocol proves the power of collective action and shows how tackling environmental woes can help us in ways we didn’t expect.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

The post Fixing the ozone hole was a bigger deal than anyone realized appeared first on Popular Science.

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