Oil Spill - Page 11

Sea life made surprisingly fast recovery after 1979 oil spill off Mexico
By McClatchy-Tribune News Service
May 23, 2010, 1:30AM


By Tim Johnson

MEXICO CITY, Mexico -- The Ixtoc 1 oil spill in Mexico's shallow Campeche Sound three decades ago serves as a distant mirror to today's BP deepwater blowout, and marine scientists are still pondering what they learned from its aftereffects.

In terms of blowouts, Ixtoc 1 was a monster -- until the BP leak, the largest accidental spill in history. Some 3.3 million barrels of oil gushed over nearly 10 months, spreading an oil slick as far north as Texas, where gooey tar balls washed up on beaches.

Surprisingly, Mexican scientists say that Campeche Sound itself recovered rather quickly, and a sizable shrimp industry returned to normal within two years.


Scientists didn't know how ecology, climate would affect spill


Luis A. Soto, a deep-sea biologist, had earned his doctorate from the University of Miami a year before the June 3, 1979, blowout of Ixtoc 1 in 160 feet of water in the Campeche Sound, the shallow, oil-rich continental shelf off the Yucatan Peninsula.

Soto and other Mexican marine scientists feared the worst when they examined sea life in the sound once oil workers finally capped the blowout in March 1980.

"To be honest, because of our ignorance, we thought everything was going to die," Soto said.

The scientists didn't know what effects the warm temperatures of Gulf waters, intense solar radiation and other factors from the tropical ecosystem would have on the crude oil polluting the sound.

There were political implications as well; the spill pitted a furious shrimping industry, reliant on the nutrient-rich Campeche Sound, against a powerful state oil company betting its future in offshore drilling, particularly wells in the continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico that it began developing in the late 1970s.


First evaluations found harsh effects on sea life


In the months after Ixtoc 1 was capped, scientists trawled the waters of the sound for signs of biological distress.

"I found shrimp with tumor formations in the tissue, and crabs without the pincers. These were very serious effects," Soto said.

Another Mexican marine biologist, Leonardo Lizarraga Partida, said the evaluation team began measuring oil content in the sediment, evaluating microorganisms in the water and checking on the biomass of shrimp species.

As the studies extended into a second year, scientists noticed how fast the marine environment recovered, helped by naturally occurring microbes that feasted on the oil and degraded it.


After two years, marine life had nearly returned to normal


Perhaps because of those microbes, aquatic life along the shoreline in Texas had returned to normal within three years -- even as tar balls and tar mats remained along the beaches, sometimes covered by sand, according to Wes Tunnell, a marine biologist at the Harte Research Institute of Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi.

"We were really surprised," Lizarraga said. "After two years, the conditions were really almost normal."

The Gulf currents and conditions of the Ixtoc 1 spill helped. Unlike the BP blowout, which has spewed at least 5,000 barrels of oil a day, and perhaps many times that, at depths near 5,000 feet, the Ixtoc 1 oil gushed right to the surface, and currents slowly took the crude north as far as Texas, killing turtles, sea birds and other sea life.

"I measured 80 percent reduction in all combined species that were living in the intertidal zone," Tunnell said.

While that was severe, Tunnell noted that natural oil that seeps from the seabed releases the equivalent of one to two supertankers of crude in the Gulf of Mexico each year.

"It's what I call a chronic spill," Tunnell said. "The good side of having all that seepage out there is that we've got a huge population of microbes, bacteria that feed on petroleum products in the water and on shore. So that helps the recovery time."


Questions about long-term effects of oil dispersants


Lizarraga, who works at the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Studies of Ensenada, on the Baja California peninsula, criticized the heavy use of chemical dispersants to break up into droplets the oil gushing from the BP spill, saying it isn't yet clear how the dispersants will affect the oil-degrading microorganisms.

In the Ixtoc 1 spill, "not so many dispersants were used," he said, allowing natural processes to take their course.

Some fundamental questions remain about the volumes of oil that microorganisms can break down in an oil spill. Tunnell said long-term comprehensive studies are rarely carried out after workers finish mopping up crude oil coating beaches.

"When it's cleaned up, the studies stop," he said. "There's a lot that we don't have the real answers to."

 BP agrees that Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an ‘environmental catastrophe’

"This morning my breaking news alerts include the following:

'BP’s top official upgrades impact of Gulf oil spill from “very modest” to “environmental catastrophe.'

That’s from CNN where they are quoting BP’s CEO. I think we’ve effectively reached ‘No Shit Sherlock Friday’ mode.

Of course, according to the AP, BP announced in a regulatory filing today that they’ve already spent $930 million on responding to the oil spill that occurred when Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, leased by BP, exploded, sank, and ruptured its oil well in the process, spewing enormous amounts of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe that’s why they’re ready to announce it’s a catastrophe. "

"...There have been dozens of oil well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico, including 39 since 2007, and the worst oil blowout in history in 1979. What makes this catastrophe new is its location in the fertile and fragile ecosystem of the northern Gulf, and the depth at which the well was drilled, increasing the dangers.