Last November 7, the 900-foot Cosco Busan container ship slammed into the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, spewing nearly 60,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the bay.

As spills go, it was comparatively small. (The Exxon-Valdez spill was 200 times larger.) But oil tarred the shoreline from Point Reyes to Half Moon Bay, closing the beaches, stalling the commercial crab fishing season and killing an estimated 20,000 marine birds. Toxins from the oil will remain suspended in the bay for some time, says oceanographer and integrative biology professor Thomas “Zack” Powell, one of Mark Stacey’s colleagues on the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. Plant and animal plankton absorb these toxins, which are in turn absorbed in even greater concentrations by the fish who feed on them. Birds have a higher risk of short-term death because, in preening, they ingest the oil.

“We have to attempt to clean them up, but I’m afraid it’s more of a palliative for us than it is for the birds,” Powell says. “And, where oil has washed up on shore, cleanup efforts are often worse than the oil because they use steam cleaning, which kills all the organisms.”

There were widespread complaints that containment and cleanup efforts were slow and ineffectual. But Mark Stacey believes that emergency officials did the best they could given the limited information they had.

“All eyes were focused on the movement of the oil slick on the surface of the bay,” he says. “There was no information about what was happening below the surface, but much of the oil had quickly moved down into the water, where it was subject to transport.” Furthermore, the central bay has a complex geometry, Stacey says, broken up by bridges, islands, a sill and shallow shoals, not to mention ship traffic.

“If we want to do predictive modeling on a timescale of a few hours, such as in the event of an oil spill, we need to know the underlying physics of the bay and have real-time data,” he adds. “It’s more important to know where a spill is going than where it is.”

To that end, Stacey is working with San Francisco State University geosciences professor Toby Garfield and UC Davis oceanographer John Largier to devise a system of breadbox-sized sensors that would sit at the bottom of the bay to monitor flow dynamics over the entire depth, then wirelessly transmit their data back to shore in real time.

The researchers are seeking funding and local partners to launch the project in earnest. With just a handful of such devices, Stacey says, engineers could uncover the mysteries of the bay’s dynamics. If they succeed, the data streaming from their devices may someday give responders a head start in dealing with the next oil spill that threatens the region.