Some 200 million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico over an 86 day period. With the gusher stopped clean-up crews have moved in to clean up the mess. The problem is — they’re having trouble finding any oil.
Two weeks ago skimmers picked up around 25,000 barrels a day and last Thursday only around 200 barrels were picked up.
Where did all the oil go?
BP CEO Tony Hayward was pilloried when he tried to downplay the spill saying something like “the ocean is a really big place.”
Well, Tony may have been at least partly right. 200 million barrels of oil is indeed a tremendous amount, but when you compare it the body of water it spilled into it’s really nothing. That combined with the heroic cleanup efforts of some 20,000+ people who worked on the spill from day one and it starts to make sense.
According to Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at LSU, this is mother nature doing her job.
The light crude began to deteriorate the moment it escaped at high pressure, and then it was zapped with dispersants to speed the process along. The oil that did make it to the ocean’s surface was broken up by 88-degree water, baked by 100-degree sun, eaten by microbes, and whipped apart by wind and waves.
Experts stress that even though there’s less and less oil as time goes on, there’s still plenty around the spill site. And in the long term, no one knows what the impact of those hundreds of millions of gallons will be, deep in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
So it seems like all of us are kind of flying blind here. It’s going to be interesting to see how all this shakes out over the long term. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the damage won’t be as severe as initially thought.
