|
About | Contact | Mongabay on Facebook | Mongabay on Twitter | Free newsletter |
|
|
Gulf of Mexico bottom still coated in oil, recovery long way off Jeremy Hance mongabay.com February 21, 2011
Employing a deep-diving submersible dubbed Alvin, Joye undertook five expeditions over 2,600 square miles of the Gulf's floor. She used chemical analysis to identify that the oil on the floor was indeed from the BP Macondo well that blew out last April. Having studied many of the locations before, Joye said the oil spill had a noticeable impact. "Filter-feeding organisms, invertebrate worms, corals, sea fans—all of those were substantially impacted—and by impacted, I mean essentially killed," she told the BBC. She took photos and video of and the oil-choked bodies of marine life, such as crabs, corals, brittle stars, and tube-worms. Instead of the Gulf recovering by 2012, Joye told the BBC, it will probably take that long to really understand the full impact of the spill, including on important fisheries in the region, as fish are ecologically dependent on many benthic species. According to Joye only about 10% of the oil was consumed by microbes, complicating the narrative that microbes had consumed most of the oil already. "There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading," Joye told the conference as reported by the AP. BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20th, 2010, sending some 4.9 million barrels of oil and up to 500,000 tons of methane into the Gulf of Mexico over three months. The US consumes more oil than any other country in the world. In 2007 the US consumed over 20 million barrels of oil everyday: nearly three times as much as the number two consumer, China. For decades the US has focused on producing more oil, instead of increasing efficiency or lowering consumption.
Related articles
Tags: oil spills oil fossil fuels disasters united states green environment jeremy hance pollution marine animals oceans deep sea animals wildlife Environmental news index | RSS | News Feed | Twitter | Home Advertisements:
|
|
|
DON'T LIKE ADS? Become a mongabay supporter WEEKLY NEWSLETTER RECENT FEATURES
POPULAR PAGES Photos
CALENDARS 
BOOKS BY MONGABAY AUTHORS
FREE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 
HIGH RESOLUTION PHOTOS / PRINTS 
|
| | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
(11/15/2010) BP’s disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico this year killed countless marine animals, but it was a boon for oil-eating bacteria. The organisms, usually quiescent deep in the ocean, burst into life when the Deep Water Horizon wellhead ruptured and released a torrent of their favorite food. A study published in the 8 October issue of Science demonstrated how quickly bacteria consumed the light crude oil.
(07/29/2010) "President Obama called it 'the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.' So I thought I should face it and head to the Gulf"—these are the opening words on the popular blog Guilty Planet as the author, marine biologist Jennifer Jacquet, embarked on a ten day trip to Louisiana. As a scientist, Jacquet was, of course, interested in the impact of the some four million barrels of oil on the Gulf's already depleted ecosystem, however she was as equally keen to see how Louisianans were coping with the fossil fuel-disaster that devastated their most vital natural resource just four years after Hurricane Katrina.
|
Copyright mongabay 2010 Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions generated from mongabay.com operations (server, data transfer, travel) are mitigated through an association with Anthrotect, an organization working with Afro-indigenous and Embera communities to protect forests in Colombia's Darien region. Anthrotect is protecting the habitat of mongabay's mascot: the scale-crested pygmy tyrant. |
