BP oil still damages Gulf of Mexico coral

This 2009 video is called Coral Reef in the Gulf of Mexico: Flower Garden Banks.

From Wildlife Extra:

The effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that are still emerging

The oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 has largely dissipated, but the impacts on marine life in the area are still being discovered.

A team led by Charles Fisher from Penn State University in the US has found two additional damaged coral communities up to 22km away from the original site and at depths of more than 1,800m, reports Science Daily.

Fisher’s team compared damaged communities found around the time of the oil spill with the new ones. The former has provided a useful model for the progression of damage caused by the spill over time.

“One of the keys to coral‘s usefulness as an indicator species is that the coral skeleton retains evidence of the damage long after the oil that caused the damage is gone,” said Fisher.

“We were able to identify evidence of damage from the spill in the two coral communities discovered in 2011 because we know exactly what our model coral colonies, impacted by the oil spill in 2010, looked like at the time we found the new communities.”

Corals are sparse in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, but because they act as an indicator species for tracking the impact of environmental disasters like the Deepwater Horizon blowout, the effort to find them pays off in useful scientific data.

The team used 3D seismic data from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to identify 488 potential coral habitats in a 40 km radius around the spill site. From that list they chose the 29 sites they judged most likely to contain corals impacted by the spill.

Towed camera systems and an autonomous underwater vehicle then came into play, which they programmed to travel backwards and forwards across specific areas collecting images of the sites from just metres above the ocean floor.

“We were looking for coral communities at depths of over 1,000m that are often smaller than the size of a tennis court,” said Fisher.

“We needed high-resolution images of the coral colonies that are scattered across these communities and that range in size from a small houseplant to a small shrub.”

In searching for coral communities impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the team also found two coral sites entangled with commercial fishing line.

These additional discoveries serve as a reminder that the Gulf is being impacted by a diversity of human activities.

BP COULD PAY UP TO $18 BILLION “In the four years since the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 workers and sent millions of barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has spent more than $28 billion on damage claims and cleanup costs, pleaded guilty to criminal charges and emerged a shrunken giant. But through it all, the company has maintained that it was not chiefly responsible for the accident, and that its contractors in the operation, Halliburton and Transocean, should shoulder as much, if not more, of the blame. On Thursday, a federal judge here for the first time bluntly rejected those arguments, finding that BP was indeed the primary culprit and that only it had acted with ‘conscious disregard of known risks.’” [Story, Image via NYT]

Federal judge Carl Barbier ruled last Thursday that oil giant BP acted with “gross negligence” during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. The ruling, part of a civil suit case involving the federal government and five US states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, could potentially quadruple the fines the company faces under the Clean Water Act: here.

BP Well Sprays Crude Oil Mist Over 27 Acres Of Alaskan Tundra: here.