While oil is known to float, new research finds that over time it can permeate even extremely deep marine habitats, with animal populations declining by as much as 80 percent.
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Across hundreds of miles of the northern Gulf of Mexico, a deepwater ecosystem collapsed after the massive 2011 Deepwater Horizon oil and gas spill, and recovery is uncertain, new research concludes. The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that animal populations—including octopus, krill, squid, and shrimp—declined by 60 to 85 percent in the three and a half years after the spill, with few signs of recovery since. The researchers identified it as the “fastest and most severe faunal decline reported for Earth’s largest ecosystem type” ever documented. They said their findings also show that proposed industrial deep-sea mining could damage the ecosystem before baseline conditions are assessed. A transoceanic drilling rig, operating for BP about 50 miles southeast of the Mississippi Delta, exploded on April 20, 2010. Oil and gas spewed uncontrollably from the broken well nearly a mile deep for 87 days, ejecting 4.9 million barrels of oil at a rate of about 400 tanker trucks per day, enough to fill up 1.2 million cars. Scientists have developed accurate ways to count fish. For this study, they started with a baseline from nine months of sampling in 2011 and compared it with nine subsequent surveys between 2015 and 2023. The research focuses on species that are not commercially fished and shows for the first time that human impacts can deplete marine life even in very deep ocean water.