Mighty oil-eating microbes

[Galactic]

Here's something I found about oil-eating microbes help cleaned up the gulf it seems the healing has started with in the Gulf.

By JOHN CAREY, environmental writer

Where is all the oil? Nearly two weeks after BP finally capped the biggest oil spill in U.S. history, the oil slicks that once spread across thousands of miles of the Gulf of Mexico have largely disappeared. Nor has much oil washed up on the sandy beaches and marshes along the Louisiana coast. And the small cleanup army in the Gulf has only managed to skim up a tiny fraction of the millions of gallons of oil spilled in the 100 days since the Deepwater Horizon rig went up in flames.

So where did the oil go? "Some of the oil evaporates," explains Edward Bouwer, professor of environmental engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Thats especially true for the more toxic components of oil, which tend to be very volatile, he says. Jeffrey W. Short, a scientist with the environmental group Oceana, told the New York Times that as much as 40 percent of the oil might have evaporated when it reached the surface. High winds from two recent storms may have speeded the evaporation process.

Although there were more than 4,000 boats involved in the skimming operations, those cleanup crews may have only picked up a small percentage of the oil so far. Thats not unusual; in previous oil spills, crews could only scoop up a small amount of oil. "Its very unusual to get more than 1 or 2 percent," says Cornell University ecologist Richard Howarth, who worked on the Exxon Valdez spill. Skimming operations will continue in the Gulf for several weeks.

More about this link is right here!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews_excl/ynews_excl_sc3270

Edited July 28, 2010 by Andromedan StarSeed

[Travelling Man]

I just wish the local Parish President (think: County Commissioner/boss) would read this. Billy Nungesser is jumping up and down that BP and the Coast Guard is lying about it.

I've been down here for over two months, helping supervise BP and the contractors - and the reports of oil on the beach are getting rarer and rarer.

[Indiogene]

It is basically a natural phenomena, oil-eating microbes exist in our environment for billions of years. Certain classes of bacteria can eat organic rock matter and a few may eat artificial manufactured elements like plastic. To come and think of it for a moment: Our primordial ancestors in the history of earth's evolution of life are microbes billions of years ago ate rock for vitamins and minerals (esp. sodium or salt we humans need as well) to substain them, and we inherited a need to eat to have a daily consumption of important essential vitamins and minerals.

Like bacteria, viruses can also sexually reproduce or exchange genetic material towards another, which was an astounding discovery in last year's swine flu (H1N1) pandemic when the CDC labs in Austin, Texas studied an example of any chance of being a theorized "biologically engineered" virus was proven to be...well, not what we thought of before. The H1N1 virus was a result of one subspecies of flu gave a chromosome to another (a very early act of species sexual reproduction), due to similarities...the H1N1 arefrom "parental" bird and human flu viruses.

While I'm still on topic on the wonders of nature in invisible microscopic form, viruses and bacterium are a different system or phylum apart from plant (florae)and animal (faunae) lifeforms. To find out the oil in the water was eaten away is still not convincing to me the toxic oil is gone, because much of the oil was sinking into the ocean bottom and any remnants of offshore oil residue in 500 miles of the Gulf coast will continually affect the ecosystem for years to come.