sakuraswordly reblogged
The lingering and extreme impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the deep sea
From the darkness emerges a boot. An old leather, steel-toed, work boot. It shouldn’t be there resting on the seafloor nearly two kilometers deep. I’m speechless. Even knowing this was going to be one of the toughest dives of my career, I’m still not prepared.
Seven years prior in 2010, Marla Valentine and Mark Benfield were the first scientist to visit the deep-sea floor after the Deepwater Horizon accident. On 20 April 2010, and continuing for 87 days, approximately 4 million barrels spilled from the Macondo Wellhead making it the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. Just months after the oil spill, Valentine and Benfield conducted video observations with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) of the deep-sea impact. Overall, they found a deep-sea floor ravaged by the spill.
Much of the diversity was lost and the seafloor littered with the carcasses of pyrosomes, salps, sea cucumbers, sea pens, and glass sponges.
Researchers continued to find severe impacts on deep-sea life. The numerical declines were staggering within the first few months; forams (↓80–93%), copepods (↓64%), meiofauna (↓38%), macrofauna (↓54%) and megafauna (↓40%). One year later, the impacts on diversity were still evident and correlated with increases in total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), and barium in deep-sea sediments. In 2014, PAH was still 15.5 and TPH 11.4 times higher in the impact zone versus the non-impact zone, and the impact zones still exhibited depressed diversity.
Continued research on corals found the majority of colonies still had not recovered by 2017. However, studies examining the impacts of the DWH oil spill on most deep-sea life ended in 2014…