Catch This!

September 1, 2010

News on the Gulf Oil Spill

This is taken directly from SEAFOOD.COM NEWS -

The Gulf of Mexico ecosystem was ready and waiting for something like the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and seems to have made the most of it, a new scientific study suggests. Petroleum-eating bacteria - which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the seafloor - proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted for months after the April 20th accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.

The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing the amount of oil in the undersea plume by half about every three days, according to research published online Tuesday by the journal Science. The findings, by a team of scientists led by Terry C. Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, help explain one of the biggest mysteries of the disaster: Where has all the oil gone? "What we know about the degradation rates fits with what we are seeing in the last three weeks" Hazen said. "We've gone out to the sites, and we don't find any oil, but we do find the bacteria. The species dominating the digestion of the oil is a newly discovered one, Hazen said.

Alan Mearns, a senior staff scientist in the emergency response of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, called the new Berkely team study "critical to the understanding of the fate of what remains in the Gulf. This study shows that microbes are quickly degrading some components of subsurface oil found in the deep ocean without creating hazardous dead zones."

Some of the spill's 206 million gallons of oil has come ashore, some has sunk into bottom sediments, and a little is still a floating froth. But the mile-wide, 650-foot-high oil cloud that drifted for months drifted 4,000 feet underwater seems to have disappeared in the six weeks since the well was plugged.

The plume's wherabouts is a contentious matter.

The research team is continuing to collect deep-water samples. It could still find an oil plume two weeks after the well was plugged. No plume could be found in the past three weeks, however. The oil that remains appears to be too diluted out to be detected.