Deepwater Horizon spill may have been 30 per cent bigger than thought

[Eugene]

Source: NewScientist

Deepwater Horizon spill may have been 30 per cent bigger than thought

ENVIRONMENT 12 February 2020
By Adam Vaughan

The US’s worst ever oil spill, at a BP rig a decade ago, may have been almost a third larger than previously thought. The finding, published today, comes as the oil giant launched a new bid to burnish its environmental credentials.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 saw nearly 800 million litres of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, which satellite tracking suggested covered an estimated 149,000 square kilometres. But an analysis suggests that the real extent of the spill may have been 30 per cent greater, because much of the oil was invisible to satellites. The study also found that the oil extended much deeper than satellites had detected, with toxic concentrations 1.3 kilometres down.

A US team arrived at this estimate using data from 25,000 samples of water and sediment from the area, much of it only released in recent years by BP, in addition to satellite and aerial images. It used these to model how far the oil is likely to have spread, accounting for ocean currents, temperature and the biodegradation of oil.


The results suggest the spill reached as far as the West Florida shelf, Texas shores and Florida Keys. “The environmental damage extends substantially beyond what was previously estimated both in space and time,” says Claire Paris-Limouzy at the University of Miami, Florida.

Dolphin deaths

While these previously undetected hydrocarbons weren’t picked up by satellites, they were found at levels “potentially lethal and sublethal” to marine organisms at different depths. “The impact on marine life was, and still is, larger than expected,” says Paris-Limouzy. The spill has been linked to deaths of dolphins, lobsters and smaller animals such as sea cucumbers.

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Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2233346-deepwater-horizon-spill-may-have-been-30-per-cent-bigger-than-thought/

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Related: Invisible oil beyond the Deepwater Horizon satellite footprint (Science Advances)

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Everyone from Galveston to the Keys were saying this.

BP just bribed the state officials to accept their figures and not spook the almighty tourist dollar.

But locally we were hearing about the night time airplane spraying of the toxic Co-rexit chemicals which sank the oil to the floor of the gulf, destroyed the marshlands, sickened people, etc.
There was a broken BP pipeline on the gulf floor, which was monitored by a live camera, partly to help measure how much oil was pouring into the water.
Finally someone discovered that camera feed was fake, it was a closed loop. taken at a time when the leak was still small.

They all lied...Exxon, BP, Shell, etc.