Five years later, nation's worst oil spill still a puzzle

Vernon Asper is a scientist who works in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, looking for oil. It's still out there, five years after the nation's worst oil spill — the Deepwater Horizon blowout in April 2010 that killed 11 rig workers and spewed what was estimated at the time to be 205 million gallons into the Gulf over three months.
How much is there and where it is are legitimate questions, but five years out, answers still aren't there.
It may have to be enough to know scientists are still looking and that some of it is accounted for — burned, skimmed, oxidized and eaten by bacteria. But it is in the deep waters. And learning how oil connects with sediment is important to finding where the oil is.
One theory is it collected and moved through a canyon on the Gulf floor like a series of underwater mountain streams, or stuck to the Continental shelf. About 10 million gallons was found to have settled on the Gulf floor around the rig.
Asper, a professor of marine sciences for the University of Southern Mississippi, and a team received an early grant that allowed them, within months, to place monitors in the deep, near BP's blown Macondo well, and they've been monitoring ever since. Science works methodically.

"That's the way science works. It's time-intensive," said Jessica Kastler, a geologist and education-program coordinator with USM's Gulf Coast Research Lab.

The science of the spill and its impact on the northern Gulf is a quiet drama playing out in the findings of an unprecedented amount of research in the Gulf. The picture is coming together like a puzzle with thousands of pieces. Many pieces are still missing or kept from the public by a massive federal legal case being put together to determine what the spill, and the chemicals used to fight it, did to the environment.

It could easily be two decades before the small pieces of truth assemble into a cohesive picture of what the spill did to the ecosystem, Kastler said, an indication of how truly big the spill was.

Monty Graham, head of USM's Marine Science Department and the Research Lab, said money flowing in for research will make the Gulf of Mexico the most-studied body of water in the world.

This research is building a catalog of work that just wasn't there before the spill, and it's expected to continue for 30 years.

Emerging pieces of the picture show that oil and the chemical dispersants used to break it up are likely contributing to the largest and longest-lasting dolphin die-off on record in the Gulf of Mexico that included dozens of still-born calves.

Scientists found oil entered the food chain in the smallest of organisms of the Gulf near Mobile Bay shortly after the spill. Toxicology studies show a mix of oil and dispersants hurt animals more than oil alone, partly because breaking down the oil makes it easier to consume.

Crude oil interrupts the ability of fish heart cells to beat effectively.

And early findings show oil spill cleanup workers reported increased coughing and wheezing and mental health symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, compared to nonworkers, according to the National Institutes of Health, halfway through a study of 33,000 workers for 10 years.

When the well blew, the National Science Foundation pushed money to universities in the form of rapid-response grants to get feet on the ground. Other research entities also responded.

Since then, BP has funded the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative — $500 million for science to span 10 years. Criminal penalties assessed against BP and the owner of the rig, Transocean, have been designated to fund another $500 million project through the National Academy of Sciences, called Gulf Project. The National Fisheries and Wildlife Foundation's Gulf Environmental Benefit fund is $356 million for Mississippi alone, and the massive federal legal case with its Natural Resource Damage Assessment includes 240 research projects and $1.3 billion in funding from BP, as well as hundreds of million from federal agencies.

Some 700 peer-reviewed papers have been published so far, Graham said.

What comes with all this will be a better understanding of how the Gulf's ecosystems work, Graham said. And unlike pure science, this body of work also will encompass how people interact with their ecosystem, he said.

When it all comes together, "we ought to be able to say we know the Gulf of Mexico better than any other body of water on the planet and if we don't get there," he said, "then we'd have to say we didn't do our job."