Shipwreck Microbial Communities as Indicators of Environmental Impact from Oil Spills

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Ecology of Underwater Cultural Heritage: From Microbial Communities to Macrofauna", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Much of the recent research on Gulf of Mexico deepwater shipwrecks has pivoted toward exploring and characterizing resident microbial communities. Developed in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BOEM’s Gulf of Mexico Shipwreck Corrosion, Hydrocarbon Exposure, Microbiology, and Archaeology (GOM-SCHEMA) project hypothesized that microbial exposure to oil and chemical dispersants had a negative effect on shipwreck preservation, e.g., metal corrosion and wood degradation. Results indicated that spill-exposed sites demonstrated a shift in community composition toward hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria. Accelerated metal corrosion was documented even several years after the spill abated. By comparison, microbial communities at unimpacted sites were more cosmopolitan, exhibiting greater biodiversity. Over time, impacted sites showed community shift back toward pre-spill conditions. The project demonstrated the effectiveness of using microbial communities as sentinels for indicating environmental impact and evidence of ecosystem recovery which ultimately led to new lines of scientific inquiry and opportunities to explore shipwreck microbiomes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• The Ecology of Underwater Cultural Heritage: From Microbial Communities to Macrofauna

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow