This article was originally on Hakai magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more of these kinds of stories hakaimagazine. com.
David Janka is at the helm of the Auklet, an 60-foot charter boat that has traveled Alaskan waters longer than the region has been a U.S. state. It is midsummer as he sails into Snug Harbor, a shallow bend in a Knight Island shoreline 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 a picture.
For 33 years, someone has traveled here every summer to photograph the humble boulder nicknamed Mearns Rock. Collectively, the photos are an unexpected outgrowth of one of the worst environmental disasters in the United States.
In 1989, the Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground on Bligh Reef and dumped 40 million gallons of thick black crude oil in Prince William Sound. The oil spread to Snug Harbor, 50 miles away. Mearns Rock and all of its marine inhabitants were “painted entirely in oils,” said Alan Mearns, the rock’s namesake, who worked on the hazmat team for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the aftermath of the spill.
During the cleanup, Exxon crews and contractors forcefully flushed oil from shore into the ocean, where it was easier to float together. But the effort also snatched away marine life.
“Our concern immediately became: Will a cleanup be worse than leaving the oil on?” says Mears.
In the end, Exxon washed some parts of the coast and left others untreated. Mearns Rock remained oiled. Over the next decade, Mearns and a team of NOAA chemists and biologists returned to dozens of sites around the region to assess ecosystem recovery after oil exposure and powerwashing. Mearns began photographing these survey visits, using boulders such as Mearns Rock as landmarks. When the larger study ended, Mearns and his NOAA colleague John Whitney secured funding to continue taking annual photos through 2012. Since then, the project has endured thanks to the enthusiasm of volunteers like Janka, who now consistently shoots and visits eight of the original locations. when they are around. The dedicated group consisted of skippers, scientists and volunteers from the local Coast Guard.
Side by side, the 33 images of Mearns Rock look like a collection of a child’s annual school photos. In one, the boulder has a thick top of stoneweed. Another year, it’s buzzing bare, followed by a stubborn growth of barnacles the following summer. Together, the photos show the dynamics of the intertidal zone, where mussels, barnacles and seaweed are clamoring for real estate.
“There’s a lot we can learn from a simple photo,” said Scott Pegau, research manager at the Oil Spill Recovery Institute in Cordova, Alaska. In June, during an aerial herring survey, he will dock his seaplane at Shelter Bay, 12 miles southwest of Snug Harbor, to photograph two refrigerator-sized boulders, named Bert and Erny.
The decades-long photo series also helps researchers understand the natural variability of the region, where the intertidal zone changes from boulder to boulder, bay to bay, year to year.
While mussels and barnacles recovered to natural numbers within a few years of the spill, not all species were so lucky. Several populations have still not recovered, including a local killer whale pod. To this day when Janka has guests at the Aukletcan he stop at certain beaches and find pockets of toxic oil just a spoonful of sand below the surface.
Janka has been well informed since the night of the oil spill Exxon Valdez wreck. He brought journalists to the disaster area during the frenzied five days following the spill, and he met Mearns when NOAA later hired him to transport scientists to their sites. Although he stopped chartering this year, Janka plans to return to Mearns Rock this summer to get another shot.
The Exxon Valdez Janka proved the power of visual documentation. So many positive things have happened as images of the spill went around the world, he says. The US government carried out oil spill legislation, established citizens’ councils to oversee Prince William Sound’s oil industry and legislated for double hull tankers. “I don’t think that would have happened if there weren’t pictures,” he says.
The ongoing project feels less tied to the 1989 oil spill and more focused on the future, says Mearns, who retired from NOAA in 2018 but continues to manage the photo collection. Prince William Sound has been gently restored, but could be devastated again. Alaska’s waters are warming, new species are moving north, and rising seas are pushing the intertidal zone along the coastline. Just a civilian council marked 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’m turning 80 this summer. I keep thinking, well, maybe I should retire. But I can not. It’s fun,” says Mearns. As long as his friends keep sending photos, he’ll keep building the rock albums, checking out each rock’s latest look while adding another photo to the end of the line.
Correction: In an earlier version of this article, those responsible for cleaning the beaches were misidentified. Exxon hired the crews that drive washed-up oil offshore, not NOAA.
This article first appeared in Hakai magazine and is republished here with permission.
