There’s still oil out there.
The 86-day Deepwater Horizon gusher sent nearly 200 million gallons of oil, tens of millions of gallons of natural gas and 1.8 million gallons of poorly studied chemical dispersants into the northern Gulf of Mexico.
And the fate of much of it remains murky.
“There’s still an awful lot of oil unaccounted for in the environment,” said Ian R. McDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University who has worked extensively in the gulf.
A massive environmental-crime investigation spearheaded by federal and gulf state officials is underway to tally the harm and has logged tens of thousands of samples from the gulf’s waters, seafloor, marshlands, beaches and wildlife.
At the same time, a handful of independent scientists report that many things aren’t quite right in the gulf. More than 100 square miles of delicate marshland looks sick, they say. The immune systems of certain fishes appear compromised, seaweed and algae production has slowed in places, and a new layer of muck coats the sea bottom near the wellhead. At least a few formerly vibrant deep-sea communities of corals, sea stars and worms now lie dead. Also dead: untold numbers of fish and crustaceans, thousands of birds, and hundreds of sea turtles and dolphins.
While the scientific and legal wrangling over the meaning of this growing mountain of data promises to drag on for years, even ardent environmentalists and cautious government officials agree on one point: The direst predictions of catastrophe sounded during the blowout have not come to pass.
“It’s not as bad as it might have been, but the jury is still out in terms of the full impact of the spill on the health of the gulf,” said Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is heavily involved in documenting the damage.
Where did the oil go?
Tracking the enormous discharge of oil and gas that surged from the Earth has proved a huge challenge for federal officials who have repeatedly said that nature, in various guises, eliminated much of it.
According to the government’s “oil budget,” released by NOAA in November, a quarter of the oil evaporated or dissolved into the water.
Another 13 percent was blown into fine droplets as it rushed from the broken riser pipe, the report says. Much of this dispersed oil mixed with natural gas from the well and remained deep in the gulf as a thin plume that drifted for months.
The chemical dispersant Corexit 9500 sprayed at the wellhead dispersed another 16 percent into fine droplets, which joined the plume, the report says.
Natural oil-munching bacteria then swarmed the plumes, according to research published in the journal Science in August by Terry Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Three weeks after the well was capped in July, Hazen and his crew no longer found signs of deep oil or gas as they crisscrossed the gulf.
“It disappeared at a much faster rate than anyone anticipated,” Lubchenco said.
In addition to the quarter of the oil that NOAA says nature erased, the Unified Command, led by the U.S. Coast Guard, dispensed with a third of it. Some 17 percent of the total got sucked into the “top hat” lowered onto the broken riser pipe or was otherwise directly recovered, loaded onto tankers and moved to refineries.
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