What I normally study is methane in the ocean.
The Deepwater Horizon incident in 2010 was, in a sense, a natural laboratory for us.
It provided a situation that gave us the ability to study a system that we would never have been given funding to study.
What happens when a large release of methane is emitted to the ocean? Where does it go? What is its ultimate fate?
We were able to measure the total mass of hydrocarbons, oil and gas, that was respired in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and how that changed with time.
And that gives us the estimate of the rates of bulk oil and gas biodegradation.
Our research indicates that approximately 200,000 tons of oil and gas hydrocarbons have been removed by microorganisms by September 2010.
What we saw was that 2-3 months after the beginning of this disaster in 2010,
those deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico started to see a sharp increase in the rates of total oil and gas consumption.
By 4 months into the disaster, those rates had passed their peak and were already starting to decline, as they became oil and gas limited.
As they basically ate themselves out of house and home in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Quantifying the rates of consumptions by microorganisms gives us some of the fundamental knowledge
that’s able to translate what we’ve learned from this disaster, potentially then to other disasters that might occur –
to other oil spills at other areas of the planet.
We’re looking at some of the fundamental capacities of these microorganisms to consume released oil and released natural gas.
And this gives us an idea of the amount of time that it would take,
in certain areas of the world’s ocean, to remove any released hydrocarbons.
Interestingly enough, we noticed that when our rates of consumption increased most dramatically,
it’s correlated with the time periods where they’re most aggressively injecting dispersant at the well head.
Now while there is much more research to be done to quantify the effectiveness and appropriateness of using dispersants in a natural ecosystem,
at least to a first approximation, our results indicate that there is a correlation
between the rates of biodegradation of chemicals, of oil and gas in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, with the addition of dispersants.
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