NIO begins fingerprinting tar balls to track oil spills

The technique will help fix responsibility

Blobs of tar on the beach at Tiruvottiyur Kuppam in Chennai resulting from the oil spill. Photo: B. Jothi Ramalingam

Environmental forensic analysts are chasing tar balls in sea coasts to trace the source of marine oil spills.

The slicky job of forensic experts working in the environment sector came to focus last month following the leakage of huge quantities of crude oil into the sea off Ennore coast near Chennai.

Samples collected from the Ennore spill will be fingerprinted at the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa, shortly.

Tracking the source of oil pollution through fingerprinting is significant as it could identify the polluters and thus fix responsibility.

It will help in evaluating the spills and devising methods for averting them.

Source determination

Crude oil explored from each well has specific characteristics. A comparison of the characteristics of oil spills or tar balls with the crude oil will reveal the location from which the oil originated. After identifying the characteristics of the oil spill or tar balls, it would be easy to track them back to the source, said a communication from NIO.

The facility at NIO, which was set up recently with the support of the DST, has been extensively used to analyse the source of tar balls deposited on the west coast of India, said S. Prasanna Kumar, Director, NIO.

The samples collected from the coast or water is subject to a series of chemical analyses to determine its characteristics for comparison with crude.

The analysis can generate huge data bank on fingerprint results, which ultimately will be useful towards mitigation of oil pollution.

The Institute has been collecting and fingerprinting the tar ball samples from the west coast since 2010. Besides the scientific identification of the source of oil pollution, the fingerprinting would reveal the residence time of the oil residues/tar balls in water and the deposit of the balls on the coast. The NIO has so far analysed the tar balls collected from Gujarat, Mumbai and Goa. Researchers plan to cover Karwar and Mangaluru coasts.