Out of sight out of mind

Apparently it is worse than they would have expected.

Mark Benfield, a professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at LSU, led monitoring of visible marine animals, called megafauna, for about a year after the Deepwater Horizon spill. He found the lack of vitality seen in the video "disturbing."

The video offers the first glimpse of the site since visual inspections ended in 2011.

"Given the amount of time that's passed, I figured that the site would look normal or well into recovery," Benfield said. "I was surprised."

Recall that BP's primary response to the Macondo disaster was to spray the slick with a chemical dispersant called Corexit.  Workers exposed to the chemicals during clean up operations also complained of serious health problems. Their symptoms were positively liked to that exposure.   As early as 2012, it was found to have caused major disruptions to the Gulf marine food chain.

In April 2012, Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences was finding lesions and grotesque deformities in sea life—including millions of shrimp with no eyes and crabs without eyes or claws—possibly linked to oil and dispersants.

The shocking story was ignored by major U.S. media, but covered in depth by Al Jazeera. BP said such deformities were “common” in aquatic life in the Gulf and caused by bacteria or parasites. But further studies point back to the spill.

A just-released study from the University of South Florida found that underwater plumes of BP oil, dispersed by Corexit, had produced a “massive die-off” of foraminifera, microscopic organisms at the base of the food chain. Other studies show that, as a result of oil and dispersants, plankton have either been killed or have absorbed PAHs before being consumed by other sea creatures.

But the important thing to remember about Corexit as it relates to the sea floor anyway, was its purpose. It wasn't intended to clean up the oil so much as it was to sink it. Get it out of sight and out of mind as fast as possible.  Seems like that strategy is still paying dividends. 

The video and study were only possible because researchers were near the site for an unrelated project.

No one is funding research into the impact of the Deepwater Horizon spill on the surrounding sea floor, said Craig McClain, director of LUMCON. Getting money for deep sea research can be difficult because it's "out of sight, out of mind," he said.

But damage to the sea floor ecosystem can permeate through the food chain to commercial fisheries and disrupt the process by which oceans pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the deep sea.

All we have is a brief glimpse of the undersea wasteland around the well head. No telling how bad it really is.