Assistance Bay in situ hydrocarbon biodegradation mesocosm experiment
The reduction of sea ice coverage is leading to the opening of the Northwest Passage which could be used as a new shipping route in the upcoming decades. There is a risk that a hydrocarbon spill caused by an unintended release during regular shipping operations or due to an accident that may wash into a shoreline. To test the capabilities of the native microbial community of the beach sediment of a shoreline located in the Northwest Passage, in this study we deployed mesocosm experiments on a remote beach in the Canadian high Arctic for a month using two different types of low sulfur fuels and a heavy bunker fuel oil. We evaluated the the response of the microbial community of the beach sediment using 16S rRNA gene amplicon, metagenomic, and metatranscriptomic sequencing.