According to scientists studying the fallout of the Gulf oil spill, the oil isn’t degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor *editor’s note: not certain if this is literal decimation (the annihilation of 10% of the life forms in the observed area) or a general term for wide-scale and unquantified annihilation. The oil spill remains stuck to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. This new report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.
Marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia revealed early results of her December submarine dives around the spill site. She went to locations she had visited the previous summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then, but it wasn’t the case.
“There’s some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn’t seem to be degrading, Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don’t know, there’s a lot of it out there.”
via [Yahoo News]
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