What would the Deepwater Horizon spill look like on your local beach? Transfer the oil spill map data to any location of your choice at www.ifitwasmyhome.com.
To get an idea of the size of the Gulf of Mexico spill, if you centre it on Malta, a black blob can be seen stretching from Ragusa on the Sicilian coast to Tunis in Tunisia, with our islands bang in the middle. Malta’s entire coastline turns nightmarish black, and Gozo is worst hit with the brunt of the crude.
With a BP rig coming to drill offshore Libya, now it could happen for real. The long-term damage to Malta’s economy that such a disaster would cause, and the threat to our drinking water supplies, is unthinkable.
Scientists are reporting early signs that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is altering the marine food web by killing or tainting some creatures and spurring the growth of others.
There has been a massive die-off near the spill site of cucumber-shaped pyrosomes on which turtles and tuna like to feed.
At the same time, tiny oil- and gas-eating organisms on which the biodegradation of the spill depends are proliferating. Oxygen levels drop as the gas is broken down by bacteria and the breakdown process halts since as the tiny oil-munching life forms can no longer be sustained in a dead zone.
The surface slick is blocking sunlight needed to sustain phytoplankton, which is at the base of the food web. Sea sponges, which filter large quantities of water, are useful as indicators of sub-lethal impacts of oil and dispersants.
So far, tainted seafood has not yet been found outside the closed fishing zones but the problem is still unfolding and toxic oil could be entering seafood stocks as predators eat contaminated marine life. A reshuffling of sealife could cascade through the ecosystem and endanger the region’s multi-billion-dollar fishing industry.
Past disasters may offer a clue to what the future will bring for the hit areas. Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez disaster, the herring population that once injected millions of dollars into Alaska’s economy is still too low to sustain a commercial fishery.
It has taken longer to recover from the Alaskan spill because of the slower rate at which oil decomposes in cooler seas.
Marine biologists say the timing of this underwater contamination could not be more catastrophic.
“This is when all the animals are reproducing and hatching, so the damage at this depth will be much worse,” said Larry McKinney, director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies in Texas.
“We’re not talking about adults on the surface; it will impact on the young and potentially a generational life cycle.”
Some, such as the bluefin tuna, which come to the Gulf to spawn, could face further depletion. Tuna spawning grounds are just south of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Bluefin tuna spawn only in the Gulf. If they were going through the area at a critical time an oil plume could destroy a whole population.
After a tour of duty in the Mediterranean with the tuna already in a precarious state, scientists on the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise will assess the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon spill on site.
More than 8,300 species of plants and animals are at risk. Scientists predict it will be many months, even years, before the true toll of the disaster is known.
Greenpeace claims that since the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig exploded and sank in April, BP has “devoted inadequate resources to the oil spill response, withheld information from the American public, and denied access to spill sites to journalists”.
Even if BP has finally capped the leaking well, the crisis will continue for some time, endangering wildlife and ecosystems, destroying the region’s fisheries, and affecting the ocean for decades to come. The vessel was due to leave Florida during the week of August 9 to inspect the Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas before approaching the wellhead at the start of a three-month expedition.
The earth’s oil has all but been pumped out from shallow wells. An addition to fossil fuel is firing the riskier, costlier drive to dig deeper and wider, as with environmentally ravishing tar sands extraction.
Commenting on the latest oil spill in Dalian, China, a Greenpeace spokesman said: “If the world doesn’t sit back and re-think solar and wind power after these past few months of greed created disasters, I don’t think we’ll ever make the switch.”
Another blogger on the Greenpeace website wrote: “The Gulf of Mexico tragedy is not unique. It is only the latest symptom of a civilisation out of control, stumbling blindly to pay the metabolic cost of reckless, unsustainable growth.”
The failure to pass a Climate Bill through the US Senate has left us sitting in a very deep trough. What will it take now to bring adaptive change?