Impact of petroleum contamination on bacterial phospholipids in a salt marsh core

The distribution of petroleum hydrocarbons and bacterial phospholipids was investigated in a 32-cm sediment core collected in West Falmouth, MA. This area was contaminated in September 1969 as a result of a spill from the barge Florida, which released between 650,000 and 700,000 L of No. 2 fuel oil into Buzzards Bay. This 30-yr data record makes the West Falmouth oil spill ideal for investigating the long-term fate and effects of petroleum hydrocarbons in the environment. Initial analysis of the impacted marsh sediments showed that the oil compounds in the n-C10 to n-C13 alkane range were lost due to evaporation and/or water washing, and that there was partial loss of the chromatographically resolved n-alkane peaks by preferential microbial degradation. By November 1973 only a baseline hump comprised of an unresolved complex mixture (UCM) of total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) remained. Analysis of marsh sediments collected at the M-1 site in 1989 found TPH of petroleum compounds in these sediments with the highest concentrations occurring from 5-10 cm depth. Bacterial phospholipids were observed throughout the core, indicating the presence of viable bacteria coincident with, and at greater depths than, the contaminated zone. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 224th ACS National Meeting (Boston, MA 8/18-22/2002).