Un-vanished

BP's aggressive use of dispersants on the Macando spill did everything it was supposed to do. It dispersed the oil from the surface of the Gulf and caused it to sink to the ocean floor.  This allowed BP (and a large volume of complicit media outlets) to set off on a misleading, "Where's all the oil?" campaign.

The confusion all of this managed to create over the amount of oil spilled into the Gulf eventually paid off last month when Judge Barbier issued a lazy, let's all just meet in the middle ruling on the matter effectively saving BP as much as $8 billion in the process.

Anyway, they're finding the oil now.

Then there’s this possibility: Though the oil has apparently separated from the water itself, it’s now burrowed so deep that it will take substantially longer to decompose. “There’s less oxygen down there,” Chanton told Live Science. “It might be there for a long period of time, a little reservoir of contamination.” He added in a statement: “Fish will likely ingest contaminants because worms ingest the sediment, and fish eat the worms. It’s a conduit for contamination into the food web.”

Worth it, though, right?