The Deep Water Horizon oil spill occurred in 2010 and is known as the largest marine oil spill ever. I heard on the radio the other day, from a not so reliable source, that contaminant levels have dropped in the 90% range since then due to naturally occurring organisms that feed off the hydrocarbons. Is there any good current research out there now that shows what current concentrations are compared to what they were after the spill?
1 Answer
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Concerning
Is there any good current research out there
the most recent study I found is
In this work, we assess the extent of degradation over 4 y postspill for each of 125 petroleum hydrocarbons that contaminated the seafloor.
and compares levels from thousands of sample sites. This seems to qualify 'good current research'.
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$\begingroup$ They also added surfactants at the source to breakup the flow into high surface area droplets more available to microorganism attack. $\endgroup$– TomONov 15, 2017 at 19:55
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$\begingroup$ Yeah, I should have been more specific with what I was looking for when I wrote "good current research". This was the most recent research I could find too and it is very informative. Answer accepted. $\endgroup$– user11318Nov 16, 2017 at 0:03