Oil spill’s effect on the Gulf
The deepsea soft-sediment ecosystem in the immediate area of the 2010’sDeepwater Horizon well head blowout and subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will likely take decades to recover from the spill’s impacts, according to ascientific paper reported in the online scientific journalPLoS One.
The paper is the first to give comprehensive results of the spill’s effect on deepwater communities at the base of the Gulf’s food chain, in its softbottom muddy habitats, specifically looking at biological composition and chemicals at the same time at the same location.
“This is not yet a complete picture,” said Cynthia Cooksey, NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science lead scientist for the spring 2011 cruise to collect additional data from the sites sampled in fall 2010. “We are now in the process of analyzing data collected from a subsequent cruise in the spring of 2011. Those data will not be available for another year, but will also
inform how we look at conditions over time.”
“As the principal investigators, we were tasked with determining what impacts might have occurred to the sea floor from theDeepwater Horizon oil spill,” said Paul Montagna, Ph.D., Endowed Chair for Ecosystems and Modeling at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, Texas A&M UniversityCorpus Christi. “We developed an innovative approach to combine tried and true classical statistical techniques with state of the art mapping technologies to create a map of the footprint of the oil spill.”
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