Gulf of Mexico Still Imperiled by Oil, Says Top Scientist

Large amounts of oil from last year’s Deepwater Horizon rig explosion remain stuck on the ocean basin floor, according to a new report.

Samantha Joye, a top marine scientist from the University of Georgia, presented the early results of her study at a science conference in Washington Sunday.

Independently conducting submarine dives near the oil spill site in December, Joye assessed the destruction of living organisms on the sea floor. She remains unconvinced of the BP spill compensation czar’s claims that things will be back to normal by 2012.

“There’s some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn’t seem to be degrading,” Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington, as quoted by The Associated Press. Her findings are at odds with other studies that claim bacteria consumed the majority of the oil.

“Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don’t know,” Joye said.

Joye and her colleagues took 250 ocean floor cores across 2,600 miles. Her team had studied some of the locations prior to the Apr. 20 spill and said there was a noticeable change in the composition, AP reports.

Joye showed slides of marine organisms suffocated by oil, including dead crabs, brittle stars, and tube worms.

The study contradicts the claims of Kenneth Feinberg, the BP oil spill compensation czar. Feinberg said earlier this month that his research shows that the Gulf of Mexico would be almost completely back to normal by 2012.

“I’ve been to the bottom. I’ve seen what it looks like with my own eyes. It’s not going to be fine by 2012,” Joye told The Associated Press. “You see what the bottom looks like, you have a different opinion.”


Capture from Ecoworld.com