WASHINGTON -- Researchers are warning that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is a bigger mess than the government claims and that a lot of crude is lurking deep below the surface, some of it settling perhaps in an undersea canyon off the Florida Panhandle.
The evidence of microscopic amounts of oil mixing into the soil of the canyon was gathered by scientists at the University of South Florida, who also found poisoned plant plankton - the vital base of the ocean food web - which they blamed on a toxic brew of oil and dispersants.
Their work is preliminary, hasn't been reviewed by other scientists and requires more tests to confirm that the oil is from BP's spill. The findings are based on a 10-day research cruise that ended Monday night. Scientists who were not involved said they were uncomfortable drawing conclusions based on such a brief look.
But those early findings follow a report on Monday from Georgia researchers who said as much as 80 percent of the oil from the spill remains in the Gulf of Mexico. Both groups' findings have already been incorporated into lawsuits filed against BP.
Both groups paint a darker scenario than that of federal officials, who two weeks ago announced that most of the oil had dissolved, dispersed or been removed, leaving just a bit more than a quarter of the amount that spewed from the well that exploded in April.
'It hasn't gone anywhere'
At the White House on Aug. 4, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco said: "At least 50 percent of the oil that was released is now completely gone from the system, and most of the remainder is degrading rapidly or is being removed from the beaches."
That's not what the scientists from South Florida and Georgia found.
"The oil is not gone, that's for sure," University of South Florida's David Hollander said Tuesday. "There is oil, and we need to deal with it."
University of Georgia's Samantha Joye said: "It's a tremendous amount of oil that's in the system. ... It's very difficult for me to imagine that 50 percent of it has been degraded."
Marine scientist Chuck Hopkinson, also with the University of Georgia, raised the obvious question: "Where has all the oil gone? It hasn't gone anywhere. It still lurks in the deep."
NOAA spokesman Justin Kenney defended his agency's calculations, saying they are "based on direct measurements whenever possible and the best available scientific estimates where direct measurements were not possible." But the vast majority of it is based on "educated scientific guesses," because unless the oil was being burned or skimmed, measurements weren't possible, NOAA response scientist Bill Lehr said earlier this month.
Dispersants hid the problem
What is happening in the Gulf is the outcome of a decision made early on in the fighting of the spill: to use dispersants to keep the surface and beaches as clean as possible, but at the expense of keeping oil stuck below the surface, said Monty Graham, a researcher at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama who was not part of the latest work. Oil degrades far more slowly in cooler, deeper waters than it would at the surface.
At the surface and the top 100 feet or so, it is obvious why oil is harmful, fouling marshes and hampering sea turtles, fish, birds and other life. Deep down, the effects are less obvious.
