One year ago the explosion on the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico occured. Almost 207 million gallons of oil had leaked into the gulf along with a large amount of methane. People are now asking one year later where the oil is now. The truth is that is has dispersed in many different ways.One statement that everyone seemed to agree with is: Some of the oil evaporated, some was gobbled up by microbes, some was burned, some washed up onto shore, some is still washing up as tar balls, some was dispersed in the sea, and some settled to the bottom of the ocean. Overall Mother Nature did quite a bit of cleaning to disperse out the oil. Each year, even when we don't know its happening, thousands of barrels of oil leak out of the earths crust into the ocean. The ocean and its inhabitants have been dealing with this for thousands of years. Tiny bateria break down this oil to make it easier for the other organisms in the ocean to deal with them. However, there are many others who don't believe that these tiny bateria could have possibly cleaned up a huge amount of this oil. In their research they found out that a lot of the oil that had leaked into the ocean is now sitting on the bottom of the ocean, which is true. A small vessel dove down to the bottom of the ocean where the oil plume was last located and they found that a lot of the oil is on the ocean floor and along with that many deceased fish and other marine animals. As of right now, researchers believe that a quarter of the oil that was leaked was contained and burned, but now the trick is to find the other three quarters of the leaked oil and try to get it out of the ocean before it does anymore harm.
I think that its just crazy that it has been a year since this happened last year. It seems like this just happened a few months ago. After the first few preliminary rounds from the press you really haven't heard much about what has happened in the gulf. This would lead you to assume that the situation is alright only many people and researchers still don't know where much fo this oil is located still. By now I was thinking that they had figured out where all this oil was located because they know where it leaked from and they know where and how the currents move in the ocean, so really you would assume that they would know where this oil is located. One other thing that comes into my mind is that this is not the world's worst oil spill. The Exon Valdez was the worst ouil spill in our world's history. We are still seeing some of the effects of that oil spill along the shore of the ocean but for the most part that ecosystem is pretty much back to normal. Yes, many marine animals and fish died as a result but there are many casualties in any type of disaster or catastrophy. So this makes me think that the gulf will gert back to the way it was but maybe it won't happen for another year but I really do think that it will eventually return to its normal state sometime in the future.
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