Maybe one or two quarts a day. You could scrape more oil off a Wal-Mart parking lot than comes out of those seeps,'' said Short, a NOAA scientist in Juneau. Besides this disagreement, both scientific teams accuse each other of faults in sampling and in the technique of identifying the source of hydrocarbons. The focus of their argument is the Sound's seabed. Following the 1989 spill, scientists found high levels of hydrocarbons in the seabed.
Hydrocarbons are the building blocks of coal, oil and other fossil fuels.
The findings sparked fears that spilled oil settled to the bottom of the Sound. Page and Boehm traced the compounds to oil seeps in the Gulf of Alaska off Yakataga and to seeps at Katalla, about 200 miles east of the Sound. The structure or fingerprint of the hydrocarbons from the seeps matched the hydrocarbons from the sediments exactly, Boehm said. Short said that ignoring coal was a mistake. The Bering River area also holds a massive exposed bed of coal about 100 miles east of the Sound.