Petroleum-eating Microbes Reduced Gulf Oil Plume
To say I question anything and everything a government agency or funded research facility says about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill gusher, but I sure hope this is accurate:
Petroleum-eating bacteria—which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the seafloor—proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.
The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing that reduced the amount of oil amounts in the undersea “plume” by half about every three days, according to research published online Tuesday by the journal Science.
The findings, by a team of scientists led by Terry C. Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, help explain one of the biggest mysteries a mystery of the disaster: Where has all the oil gone?
I pretty much slept through my high school and college science classes, so I really should comment, but there are so many things about this story that just don’t add up. But again, I really hope I am wrong.
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