On Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia unveiled her research regarding the remaining oil from last year's horrific spill that is still stuck to the floor of the Gulf of Mexico at a science conference in Washington. Her findings: there's still a huge amount of oil, it is not degrading and it has devastated sea life.
Remember the oil-eating microbes that were reported last summer to be "cleaning" up the spill by the end of the year? Joye's findings seem to be in contrast to other researchers' reports that are saying that the microbes did a fine job at eating up the oil. But according to what she saw and documented on her recent dive research trips, the microbes haven't been doing their job very well.
"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. "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."
This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2011.