Researchers looking for funding to study effects of spills in Gulf
Image via WikipediaScientists studying one of the biggest oil spills 31 years ago watched with alarm as funds to research the environmental damage evaporated shortly after the well was plugged.The continuing effects of the Ixtoc spill were apparently pretty negligible. It demonstrated the self cleaning ability of the Gulf of Mexico to deal with these events. Perhaps they could study why and how his happens, because people are still perplexed by the disappearance of much of the BP spill.
As BP PLC appears to have sealed its own troubled well, some of the same people who researched the effect of oil and chemical dispersants on wildlife after the Ixtoc I well exploded in 1979 off the Mexican Gulf Coast are mobilizing to make sure the situation is different this time.
On Sunday, BP said pressure testing on its well indicated an effective cement plug in the pipe. The company said it will still complete a relief well as a precautionary measure.
Scientists at research institutions along the U.S. Gulf Coast are lobbying Congress and other federal agencies for money as they rush to compile a list of must-do projects to determine the long-term impact of the spill from BP's Macondo well.
In Mexico, a group of researchers have secured government funds to investigate their side of the Gulf for the next five years. "We're getting involved right now, so that we don't see a repeat of what happened in 1979," said Luis Soto, an oceanographer who studied the Mexican spill and is now tracking Macondo's oil in Mexican waters.
In June of that year, Ixtoc I, an exploratory well owned by Mexico's national oil company, blew out, erupting in flames and causing the drilling platform above it to sink. Over the next nine months, it spewed out more than three million barrels of oil.
In the early days of that spill, U.S. and Mexican scientists armed with government funds fanned out to track its effects, but when the oil disappeared so did the much of money, they said.
Wes Tunnell, now the associate director at the Harte Research Institute, said he had been studying the oil's effect on the Texas shore with a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but "once the word got back to Washington that a tropical storm had cleaned the beaches, the funding kind of dried up."
Mr. Tunnell got a graduate student to do some follow-up work a few years later at no cost to the government. Mr. Soto, the Mexican oceanographer who is now at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said he experienced the same, although he doesn't recall how much money he got back then. For this spill, the Mexican government granted his group a little less than $3 million over five years. "The money is never enough," Mr. Soto said.
To be sure, scientists have a vested interest in seeking as much money as possible because of the job security and compensation that can accompany research grants. But many of them said more research on Ixtoc I years ago would be helpful now. A key question that scientists are still trying to answer: What happened to the oil that didn't burn off, evaporate or get collected?
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One of the reasons for the self cleaning is that oil is biodegradable and there are enzymes in the Gulf that consume. That is something the environmentalist have either been ignorant of or hid from the public until recently.
The photo above is of the Ixtoc spill.
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