>>Weekly Mulch: Oil Spill Could Bring Mass Extinction to the Gulf Coast
Like it did with the Ixtoc spill in 1979. Oh wait....that didn't happen. In fact, the Brown Pelican came off the extinction list last fall.
Thanks, Chicken Little! ;-)<<
Are you kidding?
Nope. Oil is part of nature. Its not gas....a man made product nor is it the equivalent of a nuclear explosion. Every day 4K barrels of oil seep into the GOM......naturally.
In 1979, the Ixtoc spill lasted 9 months and 3 million barrels of oil were dumped into the GOM. The Gulf recovered. Scientists are more concerned with overfishing.....a problem world wide.
"But although Ixtoc was a big disaster, it did not develop into the long-term catastrophe that scientists initially thought was inevitable.
"This is not to say there were no consequences. Just that the evidence is that these are not as dramatic as we feared," says Luis Soto, a marine biologist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "After about two years the recuperation was well on the way."
Wes Tunnell, now at the Texas Harte Research Institute, took samples before and after the oil arrived in Texas that showed an immediate 80% drop in the number of organisms living between the grains of sand that provide food for shore birds and crabs.
"Sampling a couple of years after the spill indicated the populations were back to normal," he says. Six years after Ixtoc 1 exploded it was hard to find any evidence of the oil, he says. "It is rather baffling to us all. We don't really know where it went."
But although their message is hopeful, those who studied the Ixtoc disaster warn against assuming the gulf is automatically heading for another quick comeback.
Ixtoc 1 stood in just 50 metres (165ft) of water, while Deepwater Horizon was drilling 1,500 metres below the surface. It is also likely that the quantity of chemical dispersants being used today is significantly larger, potentially blocking the work of the oil-eating micro-organisms.
But what worries Tunnell most is that over-fishing may have reduced the ability of the gulf to bounce back. "It was much more resilient 30 years ago than today. My fear is it is reaching a tipping point."
guardian.co.uk |
