Ancient History
by digby
Not that anyone gives a damn, but there's evidence that the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is still coated with oil and pretty much dead:
Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.
That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.
At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't.
"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. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil.
"Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don't know," Joye said, later adding: "there's a lot of it out there."
Does it seem to you as if the BP oil spill happened almost as long ago as the Exxon Valdez? It's just gone from our consciousness. (I assume not so much in the gulf region, however.)
We live in turbulent time (the big news today is that Libyan air force is strafing democracy protesters!) so it's hard to stay focused. But this was a really big deal just six months ago. And now --- it's ancient history. I'm thinking that may be part of our problem. Catastrophe overload.
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