Scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) published a report this week stating that newly discovered microbes are devouring oil from BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, much faster than expected.
It’s the latest in a confusing series of reports concerning how much oil remains in the Gulf of Mexico.
Last week, researchers with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reported the results of the survey they conducted in in June, finding an underwater plume of oil 22 miles long and 650 feet tall. That report seems in line with analyses made by the University of Georgia and the University of South Florida suggesting remaining oil levels are higher than government estimates released at the beginning of August.
However, Terry Hazen, a microbial ecologist with Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division, said the Woods Hole survey took place before the oil well was capped. He told Reuters that currently there is no sign of the underwater plume.
Hazen and his colleagues published a report this week online in the journal Science, stating that deep-sea micro-organisms, which have evolved to "eat" oil, were stimulated by the spill and broke up the crude much faster than expected.
"Our findings show that the influx of oil profoundly altered the microbial community by significantly stimulating deep-sea psychrophilic (cold temperature) gamma-proteobacteria that are closely related to known petroleum-degrading microbes," Hazen said. "This enrichment of psychrophilic petroleum degraders with their rapid oil biodegradation rates appears to be one of the major mechanisms behind the rapid decline of the deepwater dispersed oil plume that has been observed."
Analysis of changes in the oil composition as the plume extended from the wellhead pointed to faster than expected biodegradation rates with the half-life of alkanes ranging from 1.2 to 6.1 days.
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