This Should Settle It

The argument that the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is being happily consumed by bacteria or is being otherwise made harmless by Mother Nature was always a crock, and now scientists have found the stuff.  The dispersants may have dispersed, but the oil got back together and simply settled on the seafloor in a massive sheet over hundreds of square miles.

The Research Vessel Oceanus sailed on Aug. 21 on a mission to figure out what happened to the more than 4 million barrels of oil that gushed into the water. Onboard, Samantha Joye, a professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia, says she suddenly has a pretty good idea about where a lot of it ended up. It's showing up in samples of the seafloor, between the well site and the coast.

"I've collected literally hundreds of sediment cores from the Gulf of Mexico, including around this area. And I've never seen anything like this," she said in an interview via satellite phone from the boat.

Joye describes seeing layers of oily material — in some places more than 2 inches thick — covering the bottom of the seafloor.

"It's very fluffy and porous. And there are little tar balls in there you can see that look like microscopic cauliflower heads," she says.

It's very clearly a fresh layer. Right below it she finds much more typical seafloor mud. And in that layer, she finds recently dead shrimp, worms and other invertebrates.

So there's millions and millions of gallons of slimy, gooey crap on the floor of the ocean, literally suffocating anything on the bottom.  The effects on the Gulf's ecosystem will be catastrophic.   Unless there's some way to dredge at a depth of thousands of feet across hundreds of square miles of seafloor, that toxic mess is staying down there for a very long time, killing the basic building blocks of sea life.  That's going to go up the chain and soon.

The total effects may not be known for decades, but one thing's for sure, out children and grandchildren are goig to be shaking their heads at how stupid we were to let this happen and keep drilling anyway.