It was July of 2010, more than a week after the final plugging of a calamitous oil leak near Deepwater Horizon, and a sense of confusion was quickly spreading throughout the scientific community. As The Washington Post reports, an estimated 4.2 million barrels had spilled into the ocean from an oil well. But within weeks of that spill, about half of the oil inexplicably went missing.
“What we’re trying to figure out is: Where is all the oil at? There’s still a lot of oil that’s unaccounted for,” Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who oversaw the federal response to the spill, said at the time.
One day, oil skimmers had been scooping out of the water 25,000 barrels of oil. Then the next, they were only snaring 200 barrels. What was going on?
The drama spawned a scientific debate. Some researchers thought the oil had moved somewhere else. Others thought it had dissipated. Others pleaded for more time—they would find the missing oil. According to Nature magazine, a sense of “panicked mania” settled over researchers.
“We would love to find it to do more research on” the oil plume, said Terry Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “But it’s not there.”
A pair of recent studies, however, point to the possibility the oil was there all along—it was just hiding. According to papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Environmental Science & Technology, while everyone was frenetically searching the waters for oil, millions of gallons of it quietly sank to the ocean floor. But it’s not exactly clear how much; estimates vary wildly in the studies.
One study, conducted by researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said anywhere from 2% to 16% of the Deepwater Horizon oil believed to be in the deep ocean is actually on the ocean floor. Then another study published last week said somewhere between 3% and 5% of the oil is on the ocean floor. Read the full story.
