Fig 1.
Galveston Bay located south of Houston (Texas) is the second largest estuary in the Gulf of Mexico.
Oyster samples were collected from six sites in Galveston Bay including the Ship Channel (GBSC), Hanna Reef (GBHR), Yacht Club (GBYC), Todd’s Dump (GBTD), Offatts Bayou (GBOB), and Confederate Reef (GBCR) (Qian et al., (2001) [103].
Fig 2.
Self-reported oil and gas spills from 1998 to 2014 in Galveston Bay (https://www.harcresearch.org/).
Table 1.
PAHs (ng/g wet weight) in seafood samples collected from Galveston Bay.
Table 2.
PAHs in Galveston Bay (ng/g wet weight).
Table 3.
Biomass in Galveston Bay (g wet weight/m2).
Table 4.
PAH loading in categories of organisms in the Galveston Bay ecosystem.
Table 5.
Total delivery of PAH to the public via fisheries products, determined by multiplying measured concentrations times the landings (Galveston Bay National Estuary Program, 1993).
Fig 3.
Distribution of PAHs in various habitats of Galveston Bay (EPA REMAP 2003) [60].
Fig 4.
a. PAH in Galveston Bay sediment (central Trinity Bay) as a function of depth and time [104]. b. Hydrophobic organic contaminants (PAHs), BC geosorbents (Chars and Soot), in Core SG-6. PAH confirm combustion by-products and large hydrocarbon dumping; BC (soot) confirms high-temperature combustion by-products (correlated to PAHs) and levoglucosan confirms biomass low-temperature combustion (correlated to BC and PAH). The trends in co-occurrence of all these markers are unique to this environment and are not seen elsewhere [16]. This figure is from an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium.
Fig 5.
A and B. PAH in oysters in Galveston Bay (A, Galveston Bay Status and Trends data and B, [51]). The ship channel samples were taken at the north end of the bay, whereas the other samples were taken at the south end of the bay near the exit to the Gulf of Mexico (Fig 1). X-Axis is not to scale.
Fig 6.
PAH concentrations prior to and after the Texas City ‘Y’ oil spill (2014) near the entrance to the Houston Ship Channel between Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula (from [28]).
Fig 7.
Mass balance of PAH into and out of the entire 1600 km2 of Galveston Bay.