The Oil Is Still There
CBS has some new findings on the Well from Hell: Researcher: Extent of BP oil spill’s damage to sea-floor life “astounding”
NEW ORLEANS The vast 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill damaged the tiny animals that live on the sea floor for about 57 square miles around the blown-out BP oil well, with severe damage in about nine square miles of that area, says a researcher from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.
Pollution and damage to animal life was severe nearly two miles from the wellhead and identifiable more than 10 miles away, Paul Montagna wrote in a report published Tuesday in the online journal PLOS One.
Montagna, a professor of ecosystems and modeling, said the refrigerator-cold water a mile beneath the surface means oil takes longer to decay than in shallower waters, where spill recovery has taken years to decades. That means full recovery could take a generation or more, he said in an interview Tuesday.
The ‘tiny animals’ are at the bottom of the food chain. When they die off, everything above them dies off. There is a massive amount of crude oil on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and it wasn’t deposited in a circular pattern around the well site, there were plumes of oil tracked well away from the site.
Not all oil floats to the surface, some of it sinks to the bottom. It is very cold in the deep Gulf which significantly reduces the microbes that can actually eat and convert oil. In the warm and shallow Bay of Campeche the massive oil spill was converted relatively rapidly, but that process is much slower in deep water.
BP responded with typical obfuscation and sputtering.
2 comments
Just more proof that the CEO of BP is a dirty wellhead…
BP isn’t in court currently because they were good and knowledgeable stewards of the environment. They are facing huge fines for cutting corners to save a few bucks. which resulted in death and environmental disaster.
They have lied about what happened and what they were doing about since the first. No one who isn’t being paid by BP in one way or another is satisfied with what they have done.