British Petroleum's Enduring Gulf Legacy

Gulf fish skin lesion

The historic BP oil spill of April 2010 just keeps giving bad news. Scientists reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science a coagulated mass of spilled oil has settled on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. The source of the oil is obvious according to the study author since it has settled directly around the site of the Macondo well. Oil concentrations are as much as 10,000 times higher inside the 1200 square-mile "bathtub ring". BP disputes the report since the researchers did not chemically identify the source of the oil. The degraded mass of oil, underwater for four and half years, is about the size of Rhode Island and composed of an estimated 10 million gallons of coagulated crude. About 2 million barrels of spilled oil from the Macondo blowout were never found.

The company maintains most of the light crude dissolved or evaporated before it reached land. BP's vice president of communications wrote an article, "No, BP Didn't Ruin the Gulf", claiming environmentalists are exaggerating the spill's lasting impact. The company spilled 210 million gallons of crude over a period of 84 days into the Gulf. This event cannot be credibly compared to natural seeps in the Gulf which release a fraction of that amount of hydrocarbons per year. (estimated 96,000 tons annually versus 700,000 tons) Research shows that microbes are not equipped to digest a significant portion of the methane gas released into the Gulf (500,000 metric tons). Researchers from the University of South Florida predicted and later confirmed that oil from the Macondo blowout was swept away by underwater currents across the Gulf and deposited on the West Florida Shelf eighty miles from Tampa Bay were it will remain in the sediment for a long time. The truth is, not that the company is interested in this, not all crude oil spill impacts are acute and easily detected. The chronic exposure of sealife to toxins spilled by BP's gross negligence will take time to become known to man.