The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill occurred on March 24th, 1989. It was a terrible accident!!! Here is a chart showing how many animals have survived and how many didn’t survive. In an estimated number 2,800 sea otters and 250,000 sea birds were killed by the incident.

Not Recovering Animals- Common Loon, Cormorant, Harbor Seal, Harlequin Duck, Killer Whale, Pigeon
Recovered Animals- Bald Eagle, River Otter
Recovering Animals- Black Oystercatcher, Common Murre, Marbled Murrelett, Mussel, Pacific Herring, Pink Salmon, Sea Otter, Sockeye Salmon
Recovering is Unknown- Cutthroat Trout, Dolly Varden, Kittlitz Murrelet, Rockfish

When hundreds of plankton die because of oil, that species of animal may become extinct. Then fish won’t be able to eat the plankton, so the fish become extinct. Then the killer whales and other things that eat fish won’t be able to eat the fish, so they become extinct. Then it can go on and on and on. Oil spills can damage an entire food chain in an area. The Exxon Valdez didn’t quite ruin the food chain it just killed many, many animals as you can see in the chart above. What really happened was: The Exxon Valdez drivers saw that their route that they were supposed to take was covered in icebergs because they were in Alaska. So they took a short cut, the place they went to wasn’t exactly a beach- it was called Bligh Reef, then the oil tanker hit shallow land and oil was dumped into the Prince William Sound Lake. There was so much oil dumped into the lake that it would fill up 125 olympic-sized swimming pools! All that oil took 4 summers to clean up with 10,000 workers, 1,000 boats, 100 airplanes, the Navy, the Army, and the Air force. All that cleaning costed 2.1.billion dollars!!!!

In 1983 the Nowruz Oil Field tanker spilled 600,000 gallons of oil in the Persian Gulf.

In 1983 the Castillo tanker spilled 250,000 gallons of oil off the shore of South Africa.

In 1988 the Storage Tank tanker spilled 3,800,000 gallons of oil in the Monongahela River.

In 1993 the Braer tanker spilled 26,000,000 gallons of oil of the Shetland coast.

In 1996 the Sea Empress tanker spilled 18,000,000 gallons of oil on the coast of SW Wales.

In 2001 the Jessica tanker spilled 240,000 gallons of oil in the Galapagos Islands.

Helping and Saving Sea Life Today
Have you ever stopped to think what you use oil for? Everyone uses oil a lot. The whole world uses nearly three billion gallons of oil every day. We all use it to fuel our cars, trucks, buses, and even to heat our homes. If you have ever touched a chain on a bicycle, you have touched some oil. The black stuff that appears on your fingers is oil that makes the chains on your bike run smoothly. We use oil to make asphalt which can help us pave our roads. You can get examples of oil at a toy store, a hardware store, or a drugstore, because oil is made into plastics, which could be any of your toys or CD players. Oil is also used in medicines, ink, paints, and to create electricity. We all can help stop oil spills happening in the oceans. If you use less oil,
then less will have to be transported. We can use less oil by not using our cars when we can walk or ride a bike. We also can use less oil by paving the roads with cement. That way we are not using oil.
Think about how many lights you have in your house. Also think about all the electronics like computers or televisions. All of these things use electricity. If we all were to turn off lights, computers, or televisions when not in use, we wouldn’t be using as much oil to create the electricity throughout the house.

Animals That Die from Oil Spills -the otter-the whale-any bird-plankton-larval fish-organisms-seaweed-clams-oysters-mussels.
It's Amazing that even clams and oysters die from mere oil when it's harder to kill them with others things!
Ways That Animals Die from Oil Spills:-Hypothermia-Poison-Blockage of air holes

Mostly otters and seals die from Hypothermia caused by oil, because their “natural heaters” are on the outside of their bodies- so they can’t control their body temperature.

Any animal can die from poison caused by oil, because if the animal cleans itself, eats another animal that just ate oil, or if they swallow oil they automatically get poisoned and soon die.

Also otters, seals, and whales die from blockage of air holes caused by oil, because otters and seals both have air holes right were ears should be, so if they swim through oil, the oil clogs up their air holes and then they can’t breathe.

And the whales’ water sprouts are their breathing holes, but what happens is the whales don’t realize that their breathing holes are clogged until they come up for air.