1. Examine the “Before”
In the early days of the Deepwater Horizon accident, Ed Bouwer says that he and his colleagues weren’t particularly alarmed. “Of all the contaminants that we work with, oil is the least toxic,” says Bouwer, chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering and the Abel Wolman Professor of Environmental Engineering at the Whiting School. Though a spill can be a terrible thing for the environment in the short term, he explains, the Earth is relatively good at assimilating oil over the long haul. Unlike many pollutants, oil is biodegradable. It’s also a good food source for many species of microbes, which regularly munch on oil that bubbles up naturally from undersea vents.

However, the Deepwater Horizon accident turned out to be a far cry from a natural event. “When I learned about the magnitude, it was clear that things had gotten really out of hand,” adds Bouwer.

As he and millions of people around the world watched the news each night, mingled among footage of the still-smoldering rig and gunked-up wildlife was video of cleanup crews working to wrangle the spreading oil and mop it up from beaches. However, once this disaster wound to a close, how would these crews and researchers know that the environment was truly clean?

“The oil company will argue that things are back to normal, but how do you know if the ecosystem is still damaged? You need a ‘before’ to understand the ‘after’—a baseline for comparison,” says Bouwer, whose Hopkins lab looks at ways to clean up contaminants in water and also examines how these pollutants move through the environment and behave in ecosystems.

This summer, he and his lab were tapped to join a research project to put together that pre-oil picture for the Deepwater Horizon spill in Sarasota Bay, Florida. As of mid-July, when Bouwer’s team joined the project, this area had not yet been affected by the spill. But with a location just 70 miles from the leaking well, researchers expect that currents eventually will carry oil to this ecologically sensitive estuary. In this project led by the National Aquarium in Baltimore, in collaboration with the Sarasota-based Mote Marine Laboratory and Johns Hopkins’ Center for Contaminant Transport, Fate, and Remediation, which Bouwer directs, researchers headed in quickly to the bay before oil arrived and took a wide range of samples from water, sediments, wildlife, and plants, analyzing their chemical signatures. They’ll continue to do the same at regular intervals once oil invades the Bay.

Bouwer and his colleagues are using data from both the baseline samples and afterward to generate models of how oil and its compounds move through the environment—how these chemicals are transferred through the complicated food chain, accumulating in sea life, and how they might affect humans who consume affected seafood.

“You absolutely need that baseline data to construct models to predict what happens after this kind of disaster,” Bouwer says. “That’s something we’ve been missing in the past.”

The oil spill–related investigation of water quality that Ed Bouwer conducted this summer has resulted in a new research partnership between Hopkins and the National Aquarium. Bouwer is now leading the university’s involvement in the new National Aquarium Conservation Center. The initiative is aimed at furthering the protection of aquatic ecosystems worldwide through scientific research, education, and advocacy.