Where is the Oil in the Gulf? FSU Researcher Takes a Look
– JANUARY 29, 2016
A Florida State University researcher and his team have developed a comprehensive analysis of oil in the Gulf of Mexico and determined how much of it occurs naturally and how much came from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill.
(From EurekAlert!) — And more importantly, their data creates a map, showing where the active natural oil seeps are located.
The research was recently released online by the Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans and is also the basis for a paper with researchers at Columbia University published today in Nature Geoscience.
In total, 4.3 million barrels were released into the Gulf from the oil spill versus an annual release of 160,000 to 600,000 barrels per year from naturally occurring seeps, according to the new results.
“This information gives us context for the Deepwater Horizon spill,” said FSU Professor of Oceanography Ian MacDonald. “Although natural seeps are significant over time, the spill was vastly more concentrated in time and space, which is why its impact was so severe.”
Among the findings was that dispersants were able to eliminate about 21 percent the oil that floated on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico after the spill, but at the cost of spreading the remaining oil over a 49 percent larger area.
This map of oil also provides a basis for additional scientific research.
Using this new set of data, scientists will be able to go to a controlled area where they already know oil exists and perform controlled observations, as opposed to spilling new oil into an area. It also shows how the Gulf has adapted to natural oil seeps.
Researcher Ajit Subramaniam, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used the data set to focus on natural oil seeps and discovered something unusual — phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain — were thriving in the area of these natural oil seeps. The results published in Nature Geoscience show that phytoplankton concentrations near the oil seeps were as much as twice as productive as those a few kilometers away where there were no seeps.
Read the full article here: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-01/fsu-hit012516.php
GoMRI “In the news” is a reposting of articles about GoMRI-funded research (published by various news outlets).
