Post-BP Gulf gets slightly lower grades from experts

Post-BP Gulf gets slightly lower grades from experts
Average health score is 65, down from 71; big questions about spill impacts lie below the sea Interactive
Grading the Gulf Advertisement | ad info
Patrick Semansky / AP
An oil-covered crab crawls on a glove worn by Plaquemines Parish coastal zone director P.J. Hahn in Bay Jimmy, La., last Thursday.
By Cain Burdeau and Seth Borenstein
The Associated Press


ST. PETE BEACH, Fla. — Six months after the rig explosion that led to the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, damage to the Gulf of Mexico can be measured more in increments than extinctions, say scientists polled by The Associated Press.

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This reflects scientists' views that the spilled 172 million gallons of oil further eroded what was already a beleaguered body of water — tainted for years by farm runoff from the Mississippi River, overfishing, and oil from smaller spills and natural seepage.

The spill wasn't the near-death blow initially feared. Nor is it the glancing strike that some relieved experts and officials said it was in midsummer.

"It is like a concussion," said Larry McKinney, who heads the Gulf of Mexico research center at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. "We got hit hard and we certainly are seeing some symptoms of it."

Will the symptoms stick around or just become yesterday's headaches? That's the question that couldn't be answered at a conference earlier this month of 150 scientists at a hotel on a Florida beach untainted by the spill. The St. Pete Beach gathering was organized by the White House science office to coordinate future research.

"There's the sense that it's not as bad as we had originally feared; it's not that worst case scenario," said Steve Lohrenz, a biological oceanographer at the University of Southern Mississippi. "There's still a lot of wariness of what that long-term impact is going to be."

Steve Murawski, the chief fisheries scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, compared scientists research to a TV crime drama: "It's the end of the story that counts, not all the steps along the way."

We're only at the 30-minute break in an hour-long drama, Murawski said.

Focus turns to sea bottom
And there's a plot twist. Research findings already released have led scientists and the government to shift their focus from the sea's surface to deeper waters and the ocean bottom.

A month-long cruise by Georgia researchers on the ship Oceanus reported oil on the sea floor that they suspect is BP's but haven't proven yet. Government officials still question whether there is oil on the sea floor, but the Georgia scientists say the samples smelled like an auto repair shop.

They took 78 cores of sediment and only five had live worms in them. Usually they would all have life, said University of Georgia scientist Samantha Joye. She called it a "graveyard for the macrofauna."

"The fact that there isn't living fauna is a signal that something happened to these sites and these sediments," Joye said. "The horrible thing is they've been inundated with this oily material... There's dead animals on the bottom and it stinks to high heaven of oil."

University of South Florida's Ernst Peebles said the oil on the floor "is undermining the ecosystem from the bottom up."

David Hollander, also at South Florida, found some of the first plumes of the oil beneath the surface, something that government officials first disputed but now concede is real. Keeping the oil off the surface minimized damage to wetlands, beaches and some wildlife, so in some ways, "we dodged the bullet," he said.


Patrick Semansky / AP
Plaquemines Parish coastal zone director P.J. Hahn walks through oiled marsh grass in Bay Jimmy, La., last Thursday.
There are several reasons a sizable amount of oil didn't make it to the surface where it could do more visual harm. For one thing, BP used 1.8 million gallons of chemical dispersants to break up the oil. But scientists give more credit to the high pressure and high temperature of the gusher that spewed the oil in droplets so tiny, they didn't float to the surface.

"We still don't know the long-term effect," Hollander said.

Scientists worry the oil deep below will get into plankton and the food web, maybe not killing species directly but causing genetic mutations, stress or weakening some species, with effects that will only be seen years later.

"I think populations are going to be affected for years to come," said Diane Blake, a Tulane University biochemist. "This is going to cause selective (evolutionary) pressure that's going to change the Gulf in ways we don't even know yet."

It was a long-term assault from the well. From April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 people, to July 15 when the well was initially plugged, oil bled at a prodigious rate that BP and government officials had a hard time understanding. Initially, officials said only 42,000 gallons a day was flowing, but government scientists eventually said it was as much as 2.6 million gallons a day.

Example of Exxon Valdez and herring
One of the species mentioned most often during two days of scientific sessions in Florida doesn't even live in the Gulf. It's herring. After 1989's much smaller Exxon Valdez spill, it took awhile for the effects on Alaska's herring to be noticed, but the once prolific species crashed to extremely low levels. While other species in Prince William Sound recovered, the herring population has yet to bounce back. And Gulf researchers are wondering if that sort of thing will happen again.

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Thanks to a 30-year agreement that dates to Cold War politics, that distant lab is analyzing samples of Gulf water collected in the spill area for the U.S. government. The tests are to find out what the oil did to the larvae. The bluefin was already in trouble before the spill, its spawning stock down 90 percent in the last 30 years.

The spill, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, happened in the precise place at just the right time to threaten the bluefin larvae bobbing on the surface. The Gulf of Mexico is the only known spawning area for western Atlantic bluefin.

"Was it catastrophic for the bluefin? Probably not," said NOAA's John Lamkin, who expects data back from Poland near the end of the year. But he added: "Any larvae that came into contact with the oil doesn't have a chance."