Sixteen years after Deepwater Horizon, deep sea life shows few signs of recovery

jsbisviewtiful

It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again.

frmersdog

Didn't they dump tons and tons of chemicals to break up the oil spill, rather than spending the time and money to actually clean it up?

MaxHoppersGhost

What a crappy article. It talks about the 60% decline right after the spill but doesn’t quantify the recovery or lack thereof.

causesothere

And the companies are also struggling to recover, right? Because the damage to the company is commensurate with the damage to the environment it works within? No? The companies are largely free from consequence? Maybe our system is a bit broken.

darth_avocado

> While researchers stopped short of concluding that the oil spill had caused the declines Why though? Why are we so afraid of accountability? Because this is what people point to when trying to deny things are true: ThErE iS NO EviDeNce, sHoW Me THe StUdY, etc. etc.

hisfraudulency

Interesting that the spill hasn't dampened long term prospects for offshore drilling (besides the brief push against it around 2016) whereas Chernobyl basically nerfed American nuclear power gen.

superxpro12

The Deepwater disaster recovery very effectively demonstrated the phenomenon of "out of sight out of mind". they dumped almost 2 million gallons of "dispersants" on the oil spill... which was DESIGNED to make the oil heavier than water and sink to the sea bed. it never dissolved anything, it just hid the problem from the public. and all that oil is just sitting on the sea bed.

testing22321

There are plenty of beaches near Valdez, Alaska where you can scratch away beach sand and have black oil on your hands. That was 1989, 37 years ago. After years of appeals that the $5 Billion they were ordered to pay was excessive, they paid a whopping $507 Million in 2009.

WarOnPrivacy

In 1979, Ixtoc I released 3.3M barrels into the Bay of Campeche (DwH released 4.9M). By the time DwH happened we had already learned that exposed, high-energy habitats bounce back; sheltered and deep-sea habitats do not. ref: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles... ref: https://beneaththehorizon.org/ixtoc.html

andrewstuart

But think of the profits! Everything comes with a cost.

xyst

We are truly the worst species on this planet.

rich_sasha

BP share price recovered though so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯/s