BP Oil Spill Bathtub Ring - There's a new research showing what the 2010 BP oil spill left four years down the road. The BP Oil spill bathtub ring study, which appeared in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that a grimy Rhode Island-sized "bathtub ring" was left on the Mexico Gulf's sea floor.
The BP Oil spill bathtub ring study was conducted by David Valentine, a scientist heading the federal damage assessment research ships. The research revealed estimates of about 10 million gallons of oil that had already coagulated on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. They are around the damaged Deepwater Horizons oil rig, which blew up on April 20, 2010, reports the Associated Press.
"There's this sort of ring where you see around the Macondo well where the concentrations are elevated," Valentine revealed of the BP Oil spill bathtub ring.
The BP Oil spill from the Macondo well also left other stains which had even more oil, said Valentine, also a geochemistry professor at the University of California Santa Barbara.
He added that it is not hard to decipher where the BP Oil spill bathtub ring came from, even if there were no chemical signature tests because of oil degradation.
According to Valentine, oil levels inside the BP Oil spill bathtub ring were 10,000 times higher than outside, which is a 1,200-square-mile ring. There was chemical component on the oil which was found on the sea floor. It is reportedly located anywhere from two-thirds of a mile to a mile below the surface.
The 2010 explosion resulted in the rig spewing over 172 million gallons of oil into the Gulf throughout the summer.
Meanwhile, Scientists are still trying to figure where all the oil from the explosion went and what exact effects they had on the water and the surrounding environment.
BP defended itself and questioned the conclusions of the BP Oil spill bathtub ring study.
"The authors failed to identify the source of the oil, leading them to grossly overstate the amount of residual Macondo oil on the sea floor and the geographic area in which it is found," said company spokesman Jason Ryan via email about the viability of the BP Oil spill bathtub ring study.
In a statement to NBC News, the company said:
"Instead of using rigorous chemical fingerprinting to identify the oil, the authors used a single compound that is also found in every natural oil seep in the Gulf of Mexico, causing them to find false positives all over the sea floor."
BP also said the mapping technique that the researchers used for the BP Oil spill bathtub ring study "dramatically overestimates" the area of impact, according to NBC News.
At this point, it is still impossible to do chemical analysis, said Valentine and Christopher Reddy, the BP Oil spill bathtub ring study's co-author, who is also a marine chemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
However, other evidence which included the depth, layout and distance from the well of the oil reportedly points directly to the BP rig.
Ed Overton, a marine scientist at Louisiana State University and Ian MacDonald from Florida State University, meanwhile had nothing but praise for the BP Oil spill bathtub ring study and its conclusions.
The BP Oil spill bathtub ring research may have not pointed out the overall effects of the ring or the 2010 oil spill to its environment, the study however validated earlier research that deep water corals were coated and likely damaged by the spill, according to Reddy. Meanwhile, there are a lot of ecological questions still left unanswered. In any case, it is a hope that the impact that the oil spill has created can still be resolved.
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