Two years later - Gulf Oil Spill

Lots of hype surrounding this and one person finally arrested for deleting a bunch of texts. I think that Holder and Obama are going to milk this for a diversion as Obama has nothing to run on this November (less than 200 days!!!). From Deepsea News comes this good roundup of links:

BP oil spill 2-year anniversary: link roundup
Last Friday was the 2 year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The ramifications of the vast amount of oil and dispersant polluting the Gulf are still becoming clear, but the problem hasn�t gone away, nor is it likely to.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune rounded up official statements from politicians, scientists, and environmental groups.

There is a report from Al Jazeera citing deformities in Gulf seafood but there are no hard numbers and nothing about the deformities found before the spill. Deformities happen in any population. NY Times sputtered and fumed. My favorite is this piece written by Hannah Waters at the Smithsonian Institution:

The Oil Spill, Two Years Later
Two years ago last week, on April 20, 2010, an explosion on the oil-drilling rig Deepwater Horizon caused the largest marine oil spill in history, gushing nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil over the course of three months.

And, since then, researchers have been hard at work to understand how the oil spill impacted life in the Gulf of Mexico. It�s too soon to say whether the ecosystem is out of the red � it�s only been two years, after all! � but many researchers have been shocked at the ecosystem�s recovery.

�Like everybody else, I had visions of just gobs and gobs of oil smothering thousands of acres of salt marsh,� says James Morris, who studies marshland plants at the University of South Carolina. �But that didn�t really happen.�

As you can see in this slideshow, the marsh grasses are growing back despite being killed off two years ago by the oil. �The plants out there are really tough as nails,� says Morris. �Animals will probably be more susceptible than the plants are, but plants, after all, are the foundation of the ecosystem. If the plants are there, the animals will come back.�

While the Gulf is not oil-free, far less of the oil stuck around than scientists expected � thanks, in part, to oil-eating microbes. Because there are many natural oil seeps on the Gulf�s seafloor, these microbes already called the Gulf home and were more than happy to feed on the new source of food introduced by the spill. The water in the Gulf is also very warm � especially compared to Alaskan waters, where the last major US oil spill occurred in 1989 � boosting the microbes� metabolisms and enabling them to gobble up the oil faster.

There is a nice slideshow accompanying the post. I had written at the time about the comparative lightness of the pollution, mentioned how this is not getting traction in the US media (quoted an article from the London Daily Mail) and offered this observation:

Like I said before, if the Gulf Coast had voted strongly Democrat, this would have been handled in a completely different manner.