Geology Page has a great article on the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. You might think you have heard it all regrading this disaster, but you haven't.
Excerpts from the article, Where Did All the Oil Go?
Due to the environmental disaster's unprecedented scope, assessing the
damage caused by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico
has been a challenge. One unsolved puzzle is the location of 2 million
barrels of submerged oil thought to be trapped in the deep ocean.
UC Santa Barbara's David Valentine and colleagues from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) and UC Irvine have been able to describe the path the oil followed to create a footprint on the deep ocean floor. The findings appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Based on the evidence, our findings suggest that these deposits come from Macondo oil that was first suspended in the deep ocean and then settled to the sea floor without ever reaching the ocean surface," said Valentine, a professor of earth science and biology at UCSB. "The pattern is like a shadow of the tiny oil droplets that were initially trapped at ocean depths around 3,500 feet and pushed around by the deep currents. Some combination of chemistry, biology and physics ultimately caused those droplets to rain down another 1,000 feet to rest on the sea floor."
Excerpts from the article, Where Did All the Oil Go?
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| Controlled burning of surface oil slicks during the Deepwater Horizon event. Credit: David Valentine |
UC Santa Barbara's David Valentine and colleagues from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) and UC Irvine have been able to describe the path the oil followed to create a footprint on the deep ocean floor. The findings appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Based on the evidence, our findings suggest that these deposits come from Macondo oil that was first suspended in the deep ocean and then settled to the sea floor without ever reaching the ocean surface," said Valentine, a professor of earth science and biology at UCSB. "The pattern is like a shadow of the tiny oil droplets that were initially trapped at ocean depths around 3,500 feet and pushed around by the deep currents. Some combination of chemistry, biology and physics ultimately caused those droplets to rain down another 1,000 feet to rest on the sea floor."
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