Just near 6 million liters of oil spilled out of Macondo well in 2010, about 6 supertankers worth of oil. The ramifications of the oil spill are still being documented and far reaching but included aberrant protein expression in fish gills, altered bacterial communities, and a whole suite nastiness in dolphins. At three different sites deep-sea corals appear to be impacted (study 1, study 2). Corals were covered with brown flocculent material and showed telltale signs of stress including excess mucus, enlargement of the skeletal elements (sclerites), and tissue loss. But new work suggests that it was not the oil that leads to unhealthy and dying corals rather dispersant.

Nearly 7 million liters of oil dispersants were applied during the cleanup efforts, 3 million of these in the deep sea directly near the wellhead. Yet little is known how oil and the dispersant, and the mixture of the two, impacts deep-sea corals. New work by Danielle DeLeo and colleagues sets out to address this in three different coral species. The group collected individual corals from the deep Gulf of Mexico using remote operated vehicles. On board corals were exposed to crude oil (collected from Macondo during the spill, dispersant (Corexit 9500A), a mixture of the two, and a seawater control.

All three deep-sea coral species examined showed more severe declines in health in response to dispersant alone and the oil-dispersant mixtures than the oil-only treatments. To restate, the dispersant was more toxic than the oil. Dispersants are known to disrupt the normal function of cell and organelle membranes. This means molecules are not transported normally across the membranes and cells cannot osmoregulate. Dispersant mixed with oil increases polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that organisms break down into toxic forms. Basically, the dispersant, as designed, increased the proportion of crude oil compounds that were biologically available.

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The post Given the choice, corals would prefer oil to dispersant first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Drilling for oil is far from rare, even in deep offshore areas. Some quick GIS wizardry with public data sets shows that for the UK there are over 9000 wells in water greater than 30m depth and 328 deeper than 200m, for Norway 1390 wells greater than 30m and 546 over 200m depth. NOAA says there are 3800 offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Although these cover some of the major exploration areas, there are at least hundreds of other deep water wells around the world in pretty much every ocean reaching depths up to a maximum of over 3000m, e.g. off India. This is a huge amount of activity, but does it create a notable disturbance to life on the seafloor? What are the impacts of offshore drilling on deep-water communities and, even more importantly, how much time does it take the seafloor environment and its beasts to recover?

Oil drilling is a very complex business. A massive simplification of the deep-water drilling process is.

1. As they drill the first few hundred meters of the well (called, sensibly, the tophole) there is initial release at the seafloor of cuttings (ground up rock mixed with lubricating drilling mud), which make a volcano-shaped pile.
2. After that they put a BOP (blow-out preventer; the valve structure that tragically failed on the Deepwater Horizon) onto the well and then all the cuttings are then brought to the surface where they are (usually) processed and discharged.
3. In most open ocean environments these are then spread over a large area and are difficult to detect when they reach the seafloor. At shallower sites the surface-discharged cuttings add directly to the tophole cuttings pile.

The cutting piles are likely to have the biggest impact on deep-sea ocean animals.

If you take make a rapid perusal of the scientific literature associated with the impact of cuttings piles on the seafloor, you would be forgiven for thinking that drilling an oil well created a huge (up to 1km wide), deep (30m deep), oily pile of cuttings on the seafloor that, in a few cases, was so enriched in hydrocarbons that it attracted chemosynthetic organisms (e.g. the bivalve Thyasira sarsi).

Fortunately, since the pioneering days of offshore oil drilling in the late 1960’s, regulation has been built up and drilling practices have improved. The earlier papers on drilling impacts, written in the 80’s and early 90’s, focussed on the more highly polluting drilling sites that were then producing oil and were available for study. There were some epic papers produced (e.g. by John Gray’s group in Norway and staff of Heriot-Watt University in the UK), but these focus on outdated practices that (hopefully) don’t occur in the deep sea (at least in areas with developed regulatory regimes).

Since 2002 we have been researching the impacts of oil drilling on the seafloor fauna around active drilling rigs, using ROVs that are routinely in place on the rigs to do the research. This project, known as SERPENT (www.serpentproject.com), has been pretty successful and we have done research on nearly 90 visits to date. We are entirely opportunistic, getting access to whatever rigs we can, which can make structured science programmes more difficult. We have recently achieved one of our primary aims and been able to repeatedly access sites to see how deep-water communities respond to and recover from drilling over time.

So, what happens? The largest cuttings pile we have measured (from visual observation) has had a radius of 250 m (Jones et al. 2006) immediately after drilling. This equates to a visually disturbed area of around 0.1km2 – the size of 7 soccer pitches or a small shopping mall. The thickest part of the thickest pile we have measured was 3m thick. We have, so far, looked at recovery in two areas 1) Morvin in the Norwegian Sea (380m deep; Gates and Jones 2012) and 2) Laggan in the Faroe-Shetland Channel, North of Scotland (600m deep; Jones et al. 2012). In both of these (fairly) deep water areas there were major reductions (85% in 10 years at Laggan) in the area of the cuttings piles over time. At both sites there were also clear reductions in the animals we could see in ROV video (megafauna) within 50 m of the drilling activity. The mobile animals can swim away, but the attached or slow-moving megafauna were buried in the cuttings. Beyond 50 m, where the cuttings deposition was low, the animals fared better and there were smaller reductions in density and diversity. After the initial smothering, mobile scavengers, like prawns, move back in to the disturbed area, probably taking advantage of a feast of dead and dying animals. After 3 years at both sites there were increases in the numbers and diversity of animals coming back into the area close to drilling. At Laggan we also went back to a site that had been drilled 10 years earlier, this showed more evidence of recovery. But, even then, there was still visible disturbance (probably mostly cement) and lower numbers of animals.

What does all this mean? It looks from our data that recovery is happening even in 3 years, but is not complete (if that is even possible) until at least 10 years. This brings about loads of questions: do small animals with faster growth rates and reproduction recover more quickly, is there a particular sequence of colonization of animals, are any animals critical for recovery, what happens at the really deep sites etc. etc. It is surprising to me that these studies have not already been done, after all drilling for oil is not exactly a cheap process and if even a small percentage of revenue was invested in research (like they enforce in Brazil) on these processes the companies (and regulators) could actually practise evidence-based management. Although the individual footprint of each well appears to be fairly small, particularly after a few years, with many thousand wells in existence and many more being drilled the cumulative effects of drilling should not be ignored.

The post Can Beasts of the Deep Survive the Impact of Drilling for Oil? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Story at NPR:

A breakthrough in oil cleanup technology allows crews to skim spilled oil off the water’s surface at a much faster rate. The new device wasn’t developed by Exxon, BP or any of the major oil companies — it’s the work of Elastec/American Marine, based in Illinois. And the design won the company a rich award from the X Prize Foundation.

Oil is attracted to plastic. And water is not. That, in essence, is the basis of Elastec’s new skimmer.

It’s huge, about the size of a large U-Haul truck. And it looks something like a giant abacus. It has 64 grooved plastic discs, arranged in rows, with a scraper along the top.

“That’s the elegance of this machine. It sounds like it’s just so basic, but it picks the oil off, puts it in a trough and we pump it away, and that’s all there is to it,” says Team Elastec project manager Don Johnson. “And it does it at a nearly 90 percent efficiency rate.” (click link above for the full scoop and audio)

The post New Oil Skimmer Design Wins X-Prize first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Oil’d from Chris Harmon on Vimeo.

The post If the BP oil spill hadn’t happened… first appeared on Deep Sea News.

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More than six months after the BP Horizon rig exploded and sank into the waters of Mississippi Canyon, we still have very little understanding of what the impacts will be to deep sea marine life.  As Dr. Bik pointed out, NSF spent just $250,000 on benthic communities out of the $19.4 million Rapid Response grants awarded thus far.  While some important work has been carried out with BP funding, there is no denying that the company responsible for this disaster has sought to use its primary funder status to influence the direction of research – and even, in some cases, how and when results are communicated.  These facts, combined with the “mission accomplished/nothing to see here” tone of many government statements on the spill, led Greenpeace to decide there was a need for more independent research to assess the scope and impacts of the BP Horizon disaster.

We started in Florida, looking at sponges with Charles Messing and Joe Lopez from Nova Southeastern University.  Because sponges filter large quantities of water, they are a good place to look for impacts of even low concentrations of oil or dispersant, in the form of changes to microbial symbionts.  It’ll take six months before the analysis is completed, a good reminder that science is slow, and policy makers should not be too quick to assume they understand much about what the full damage toll will be.

Caz Taylor and Erin Grey of Tulane University have been doing some important work with blue crab larvae, so we were happy to make the ship available to them to conduct several days of plankton tows.  That analysis will take quite a while to complete, but they are growing increasingly concerned about the mysterious orange blobs turning up in their samples.   If the blobs turn out to be oil or dispersant, this will be bad news for more than the blue crabs, as it will show one way that these contaminants are entering the food chain.

We helped a team from the Littoral Acoustic Demonstration Center deploy and retrieve acoustic monitoring buoys, which recorded phonations of sperm and beaked whales.  The team has strong baseline data from multiple years, so this study should help us understand what the BP disaster has done to Gulf whale populations.  According to NOAA scientists, losing as few as three adult sperm whales could be enough to lead to the demise of the entire population in the Gulf, so we are anxious to see the results.  Natalia Sidorovskaia hopes to have preliminary findings ready to present later this month.

But what about the deep sea?  Well, if sperm whales don’t count for you, the last two projects might.  Rainer Amon and Clifton Nunnally of Texas A&M looked at oil in the water column and sediments. Using a CTD, dissolved oxygen meter, and a flourometer to detect anomalies, we collected water samples from 300 miles to the west of the spill origin that appear to be part of a subsurface plume.  One of the sediment samples taken from about 1400 meters contained oil that we were able to confirm originated from the Deepwater Horizon site.  Further analysis will be needed to better understand the scope of the plume and the impacts on benthic invertebrates collected in the box core samples.

Finally, we used a Dual Deep Worker two-person submersible to look at impacts to deep sea corals with Steve Ross of UNC and Sandra Brooke of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute.  The good news here was that we saw no visible signs of oil near the corals, which appeared to be healthy.  Of course, it will take further analysis to see if there are sub-lethal effects, such as reduced growth rate or reproductive success, or if the corals are more susceptible to disease.

Of course, all of this work still doesn’t scratch the surface when it comes to fully understanding what the impacts of the BP Horizon disaster will be, which will be felt for decades.  We were pleased to be able to contribute to the work being done in the Gulf, though, and will work with our scientific partners to ensure the results are shared with the public and with policy makers.

The post Guest Post: Greenpeace in the Gulf of Mexico – an Update first appeared on Deep Sea News.

via EU clashes with Greenland over international stewardship of Arctic | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

The post EU Clashes with Greenland over Arctic first appeared on Deep Sea News.

That’s right, new work suggests BP’s estimates of oil flowing from the broken well were an order of magnitude off.  With these revised estimates, the BP Gulf Spill is 10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.  The new estimate calculates flow rate from the resolution of the plume in 30 second video grabs with a method called optical plume velocimetry technique (o’ yes I will be dropping that into conversation this weekend over cocktails).  The faster the flow the lower the resolution of the plume in the video.  Interestingly, this technique was developed to measure venting at hydrothermal vents.  Love this quote from the press release

“This is a great example of how basic research that doesn’t seem to have any immediate value suddenly gains huge immediacy for society,” said study researcher Timothy Crone, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University, in a statement.

The post That’s 56,000 Barrels A Day…Not 5,000 first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Mike Bok of the sensational Arthropoda blog has the latest Carnival of the Blue (edition #39!) up. Lots of great reads. Next month is held at our good friend Angelo’s Saipan Blog. For “Carnival of the Blue XL: Top of the Food Chain” edition send in your posts about predation in particular. Angelos is calling out for shark stuff, but let’s show everyone who is REALLY at the top of the food chain. I mean, sharks are really sub-par at best.

Physics prof and history of science buff, Dr. Skyskull, has an epic post about the history of research on the Giant Squid over at his new blog on Scientopia. It is one of the best posts I’ve read in a long time. Please do it some justice and read it, at least look at the pictures!

For those who don’t know, in 1873 a fisherman had a genuine battle with a giant squid off the coast of Newfoundland.  This battle, the only one of its kind I am aware of, was also momentous in that it resulted in the first giant squid specimen studied scientifically on land!

Culturing Science has two very well thought out post on Inevitability and Oil (part 1 and part 2). I agree with most of what she is saying, especially this quote from part 2:

While economists often like to talk about the “end of oil,” I don’t have a good feel for the public mindset on the topic.  While the “sustainability movement” is picking up speed, it often feels to be, frankly, bullshit sold at Whole Foods wrapped in 10 layers of plastic packaging to make people feel better about themselves.  I can tell you this: I hadn’t noticed so much attention aimed toward ending our oil dependence until we saw pictures of pelicans covered in oil right in our own backyard, our own fishing grounds, affecting our own people in the BP oil spill.

While a competitive species should be concerned about this for their own sake, this recent rise in “oil awareness” is instead due to the harm we’re causing other species.

Carl Zimmer has a well-written article up at Yale’s  360 Environment magazine titled “A Looming Oxygen Crisis and Its Impact on World’s Oceans” (nice job of working Loom into the title Carl ;)… ). In particular, worth a read as he links ocean acidification and dead zones together, something rarely done but a great way to link two issues that are effectively acting synergistically in our oceans.

One our favorite blogs at DSN is Time to Eat the Dogs, written by author and University of Hartford history professor Michael Robinson. It is a blog about the history of science and exploration. It is much more than a historical account. Michael has a fantastic talent at being to humanize the journey of scientists and explorers. He doesn’t update often but when he does it is always a wonderful read. WNPR’s Where We Live radio program interviewed Michael and a very insightful conversation ensued about exploration, plus he gives some nice lip service to DSN! “Deep sea news is a great blog where they talk about the invertebrates of the wild and the explorations to these places”. Thanks lot Michael! Also on the program were discussions of cave and tree canopy exploration that were really cool.

Over at Mind of a Markov Chain, blogger apeescape created a neat animation of bluefin tuna tracks during the time of the oil spill plotted on Google Earth. This follows on the heels of the great Teo & Block 2010 paper in PLoS One on Bluefin tracking.

Finally, I am sucker for anything by or about T.H. Huxley. Eric Michael Johnson of the Primate Diaries has a superb post “The Scientist and the Anarchist: Part I” as part of his Exile tour over at Cocktail Party Physics. In here he put Huxley in light on his upbringing in Victorian East London. Huxley, who would later become of one the greatest anatomists and champions (and confidant) of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, was shaped by growing up in one of the “most profound failures of urban planning the world has ever seen” and a “society on the brink of collapse”.

If the city is an ecosystem, Huxley embodies the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Lanky and high-strung, estranged from his father at an early age, and the youngest of six children, Huxley was primed from birth to view life as a struggle.

Cannot wait for part 2 next week!

Gulf Coast Highway, written by Nancy Griffith, performed here by Emmylou Harris and Dave Matthews. Nice.

The post The Giant Linkopod first appeared on Deep Sea News.

We have been searching and searching for the correct nautical term for the act of dumping oil into the water to calm the seas. As a prior USCG vet, I have heard this term but cannot remember it to save my life… Any Ideas?

I did a few quick Google searches, searched a bit of the historical literature and wrote back apologetically,

Thanks for your question, It is a very interesting one. As you probably know we are very intrigued by nautical history. Most of what I know about this practice is referred to as “pouring oil on troubled waters” or some such variant. Ben Franklin actually studied this phenomenon extensively and referred to it as “wave-stilling”. I am unaware of a specific nautical term though. I copied the DSN co-editors in case they might know another term.

I attached 2 documents that are fascinating reads about this if you don’t mind the pdf’s. One is by dutch historian Joost Mertens “The honour of Dutch seamen: Benjamin Franklin’s theory of oil on troubled waters and its epistemological aftermath” and another is a 1884 report by Lieutenant Wyckoff of the US Navy. I plan on reading Franklin’s original paper soon too. Anecdotal evidence but great accounts nonetheless. You have inspired me to write up a post on DSN about this in the near future!

To which he was grateful for the reply.

Ironically we were talking about how devastating it would be to have a hurricane come through the gulf with all the oil sitting there – but then again, perhaps it would ameliorate the hurricane’s effects by limiting evaporation and airborne water spray…

This idea was a little foreign to me, not because it didn’t make sense to me, but because I was thinking of the enormous scale of a hurricane and the much smaller scale of the oil spill (at that time). There would certainly have to be a lot of oil on the water to have any stilling effect. Now in the 63rd day of the spill with no end in sight, lack of scale seems less of an issue.

The use of oil on troubled waters was discussed by Aristotle and Pliny, both of who described how Mediterranean divers would coat oil around their eyes to “quiet the surface and permit the rays of light to reach them” (Wyckoff 1886). Additionally, fishing vessels and whalers would carry oil, or whale blubber in the latter case, specifically for use in crossing straits known to have rough weather. As Wyckoff wrote in a very interesting historical review of the use of oil in stormy seas:

Whalers have resorted to oil and blubber, in severe storms, for the last two hundred years. Very recently, an old whaler informed me, that it was their custom to hang large pieces of blubber over, each quarter of their vessel, when running before a heavy sea, and it entirely prevented the water coming on board.

Many scientists have recognized the value of local knowledge, which has provided a springboard to many fruitful areas of basic and applied research. Ben Franklin was the first to systemically collect stories and develop hypotheses that he then experimentally tested during his many years in Europe. He captured many instances of folklore by Captains swearing by fish oil in storms, boatswains letting out barrels of blubber to help make landfall in the whitecaps, and seals eating oily fish and producing calm waters around feeding colonies that Scottish sealers used find them. Like all anecdotes, these were met with skepticism. In a letter Franklin published in 1774 from colleagues Rev. Farish to Dr. Brownrigg,

According to his representation, the water, which had been in great agitation before, was instantly calmed, upon pouring in only a very small quantity of oil, and that to so great a distance round the boat as seems a little incredible. I have since had the same accounts from others, but I suspect all of a little exaggeration. PLINY mentions this property of oil as known particularly to the divers, who made use of it in his days, in order to have a more steady light at the bottom. […]

Old PLINY does not usually meet with all the credit I am inclined to think he deserves. I shall be glad to have an authentic account of the Kerwick experiment, and if comes up to the representations that have been made of it, I shall not much hesitate to believe the old Gentleman in another more wonderful phaenomenon, he relates, of stilling a tempest only by throwing up a little vinegar into the air.

Franklin experimentally tested the stilling effects of oil in natural settings, a first at that time, several instances over the course of 18 years. At first, he made fun of Captain’s suggestions of using oil in rough seas, but being the ardent scientist he was, Franklin put these observations to test. He describes his first experiment at a pond in Clapham Commons, where he often stayed:

At length being at Clapham where there is, on the common, a large pond, which I observed to be one day very rough with the wind, I fetched out a cruet of oil, and dropt a little of it on the water. I saw it spread itself with surprising swiftness upon the surface; but the effect of smoothing the waves was not produced; for I had applied it first on the leeward side of the pond, where the waves were largest, and the wind drove my oil back upon the shore. I then went to the windward side, where they began to form; and there the oil, though not more than a tea spoonful, produced an instant calm over a space several yards square, which spread amazingly, and extended itself gradually till it reached the lee side, making all that quarter of the pond, perhaps half an acre, as smooth as a looking-glass.

Subsequent demonstrations were carried out at other ponds in the UK countryside. Franklin hypothesized that oil reduces the friction between air and the surface of the water. Finally, he was able to convince Capt. Bentnick to help him carry out a large-scale experiment in sea-trial conditions off of Portsmouth. With parties stationed at every angle on a windy day to observe the change in sea state, oil from a barge was poured in a tract starting from the Lee-Shore. While the experiment did not temper the swelling of the sea, Franklin and several of the observers noticed very few white-caps and its “surface was not roughened by the Wrinkles or smaller Waves”. Franklin concluded,

… tho’ Oil spread on an agitated Sea, may weaken the Push of the Wind on those Waves whose Surfaces are covered by it, and so by receiving less fresh Impulse, they may gradually subside; yet a considerable Time, or a Distance thro’ which they will take time to move may be necessary to make the Effect sensible on any Shore in a Diminution of the Surff.

What he is saying is when a force causes water to move, the motion does not stop immediately when the force stops. It ripples away and its intensity lessens with time, assuming no new “impulse”. He suggests the oil weakens the effect of the wind, and more quickly lessening the effects of the “impulse”. Franklin contemplates that more time and starting the oil at a greater distance from the windward-shore may produce a larger stilling effect.

Ben Franklin’s experiments did not definitively conclude the hundreds of years of mariner’s anecdotes. Even today it is not clear whether pouring oil on troubled waters produces the desired effect. Also, I might propose that cases where such a measure succeeds are likely to be reported more often so the anecdotes may be biased.

With the impending hurricane season, some have suggested that the oil may calm the waters, giving the Gulf coast States a reprieve. Indeed over 100 years after Franklin’s paper, Lieut. Wyckoff of the United States Navy reported 115 additional reports from the Hydrographic Office, noting all reported successful uses of oil in stormy seas except four. His last report comes from Captain E.L. Arey of the schooner Jennie A. Cheney,

” I used oil with very satisfactory results during the late severe hurricane of the 25th of August, in latitude 31 N., longitude 790 W. The wind having carried away the mainsail, I bent a storm trysail, and continued under that sail until it also blew away. During the time, the vessel was shipping large quantities of water, the sea being very irregular, nearly every one breaking. After the sails were blown away, finding it necessary to do something to save the ship and crew, I took a small canvas bag and turned about five gallons of linseed oil into it, and hung it over the star- board quarter. The wash of the sea caused a little of the oil to leak out, and smoothed the surface, so that for ten hours no water broke aboard. I consider that the oil used, during the last and heaviest part of the hurricane, saved vessel and crew.”

It is difficult to reconcile all the successful reports that operated on the very localized scale of a single ship and the seas around it with the immense scale of the oil-laden northern Gulf of Mexico. Will wave breaks be tempered by the floating oil slick and plume? I took a look at wave height anomaly and sea surface height from satellite data at a couple stations south of Louisiana and did not notice any appreciable difference from April 1 to June 20 greater than background variation. It appeared there was more scatter after the Deepwater Horizon spill compared to the same dates in 2009, but its really all hand-waving.

Unfortunately, this will inevitably be a horrible, but important, experiment and I will be following it intently. The volume of oil out there and rate of spreading is immense. By the time this summer’s storms come around to the upper Louisiana slope, it will only have grown in size. Accurate measure of surface area of the spill and sea state data will be important to test this hypothesis on such a large scale. All these data are being constantly monitored, so it should be apparent relatively quickly after a major storm whether oil does indeed calm troubled waters.

On the other hand, oil has in smaller scale over the course of a long time been spilling into the northern Gulf for decades. These oil rigs surely leak a little here and there, there have been tanker collisions and other major spills, and lest we forget that the Gulf deep seafloor is covered with naturally occurring gas/oil seeps. MacDonald and colleagues followed the path of oil as it left the seafloor into the water column. They found that there was little chemical alteration in the water column, but at the surface slicks formed and the volatile components rapidly evaporated.

This natural seepage has been occurring for centuries, millenia even. Surely any effect of temperament would already be apparent. Additionally, we may not be to detect any difference if oil is always naturally seeping into the Gulf despite major oil catastrophes occurring in the last 50 years, which could mean either not enough volume present to produce an effect or an effect does not exist.

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Franklin, Benjamin (1774). Of the Stilling of Waves by means of Oil. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 64, 445-460 DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1774.0044

MacDonald, I., Leifer, I., Sassen, R., Stine, P., Mitchell, R., & Guinasso, N. (2002). Transfer of hydrocarbons from natural seeps to the water column and atmosphere Geofluids, 2 (2), 95-107 DOI: 10.1046/j.1468-8123.2002.00023.x

Mertens, Joost (2008). The honour of Dutch seamen: Benjamin Franklin’s theory of oil on troubled waters and its epistemological aftermath. Hosted at BenFranklin300.org

Wyckoff, Lieut. A.B. (1886). The use of oil in storms at sea Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 23 (123), 383-388 (JStor)

The post Pouring Oil on ‘Troubled Waters’ first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The folks over at Iglu Cruise lines compiled an up to date infographic on the Gulf of Mexico oil leak spill disaster ecological catastrophe. Head over there for the full monty. Below is a snippet that puts Oilmageddon 2010 in context.

The post Oilmageddon Timeline Update first appeared on Deep Sea News.