For as long as oil pollution persists in the Gulf — for decades or longer — invertebrate life will feel the impacts. Forty years after an oil spill off the coast of Massachusetts, fiddler crabs are still being harmed by persistent pollution.
Scientists tracing the fate of the dispersed oil in the water column have found that oil particles are being transferred within the food web, posing ongoing risks to all Gulf marine life, including tiny invertebrates. Oil, dispersed oil and dispersants are all toxic to marine and onshore plants like seagrasses, mangroves and wetland vegetation, which provide habitat and food for many species.
Oil pollution can have long-term negative effects on plants, and oil trapped in plant roots can become re-suspended in the water column during storms. Tarballs and subsurface oil on beaches threaten terrestrial mammals such as federally protected beach mice, including the Alabama, Choctawhatchee, St. Andrews and Perdido Key beach mice. Mice can ingest tar balls and subsurface oil when building their burrows, putting them at risk of tumors and lowered immune response.
The price paid by Gulf wildlife for the BP oil spill is unacceptable. And despite its massive size, this spill was just the latest in a string of ongoing and inevitable spills in the region. Several hundred known spills involving offshore drilling have occurred there since Spills massively degrade ecosystems and devastate all the wildlife dependent on those ecosystems in the Gulf.
Clean-up efforts only remove a fraction of the persistent oil and gas spilled. The remainder of the oil, including millions of gallons remaining in the Gulf, will continue to poison wildlife for generations. Besides the direct harm to wildlife, the spill impoverishes the people of the Gulf and the nation, who depend on this rich body of water for food, culture, environmental enrichment and recreation.
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Paid Content How Hong Kong protects its sea sanctuaries. However, in order for Old Faithful to spew out the volume of oil leaked over the course of the BP spill, it would take the famous geyser approximately 76 days, 1 hour and 23 minutes - continuously erupting at full strength - to release that much oil. The BP spill was bad, but how does the volume of oil lost compare to other similar spills? One of the most recognizable oil spills in US history, the Exxon Valdez, leaked "only" about The Exxon Valdez spill is remembered as such a large disaster because it occured in a remote area of Alaska, where the inaccessibility and pristine surroundings seriously compounded the event's environmental impact.
The largest spill in modern times was during the Gulf War in Kuwait, where an estimated Compared to the Kuwait spill, the volume of oil in the BP incident was about With approximately 4. Enough to power , US homes for one year. Energy from oil can be understood via the Barrel of Oil Equivalent or BOE, which is a unit of energy based on the approximate energy released by buring 1 barrel of crude oil.
From this conversion, a single barrel of oil yields approximately 5,, BTU, and from this the oil spilled into the gulf could be converted to about According to this number, the energy lost in the spill would be enough to power , American homes for 1 year. Even to transport the amount of spilled oil over land would pose a significant challenge.
A typical large-capacity tanker truck, much like the ones used to fill gasoline stations or carry liquids over land in large quantities, can carry loads of up to around 9, gallons. To carry the million gallons spilled, you'd need the capacity of about 20, tanker trucks.
We may never know the full extent of the ecological damage. Indeed, from a legal standpoint, the legacy of the Gulf oil spill is the sheer size of the payout, which ushered in an era of multibillion dollar criminal and civil penalties for environmental and other corporate crimes. In most other respects, however, the legal landscape governing offshore drilling is unchanged from before the spill.
The U. BP endured years of costly litigation in the wake of the Gulf oil spill. In the company reached an agreement with the Justice Department to plead guilty to 14 criminal counts , including manslaughter, obstruction of Congress and violations of the Clean Water Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
The BP settlements set benchmarks that influenced the size of penalties imposed for subsequent corporate wrongdoing. Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have paid billions of dollars in fines since the financial crisis for misconduct that included mortgage fraud. But it was on the brink of collapse after the spill, and few other companies could afford the costs BP incurred.
From a corporate accountability and deterrence standpoint, the settlements were a significant achievement that should deter similar misconduct.
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