Galeta Oil Spill Project - Documentation

Abstract

In April, 1986 a major oil spill polluted an area of coral reefs, mangrove forests, and grassbeds along the Caribbean coast of the Republic of Panama. The area affected included a biological reserve of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) where baseline biological and environmental data had been collected for the previous 15 years. Shortly after the spill, a grant to study the effects of the spill was received from the Minerals Management Service of the United States Department of the Interior. Data was then collected from May of 1986 to October of 1991 and the results of the study were published as a technical report and as an executive summary of the MMS.

The final report contains the documentation of the collection methods for the files submitted here. In some cases however, this document contains additional documentation for particular files, otherwise most of the documentation was taken from a late draft of the final report. The excerpted parts are indicated with quotation marks, the other documentation was written by Karl Kaufmann, the data manager for the project.

The study was carried out by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute under Minerals Management Service contracts 14-12-0001-30355 and 14-12-0001-30393. All of the data collected under this contract is presented here. It is also available from the National Oceanographic Data Center (Accession # 9400033).

The study continued in part for an additional year under another grant, but that data is not included, nor is data collected before the spill or data collected by the STRI ESP program (such as the urchin data from Galeta). Most of the data on the chemistry of the oil are presented in tables in the final report and are not available in digital format.