Bottom Kill

Scientists Find Dead Animals in Thick Oil on Ocean Floor

The Research Vessel Oceanus sailed on Aug. 21 on a mission to figure out what happened to the more than 4 million barrels of oil that gushed into the water. Onboard, Samantha Joye, a professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia, says she suddenly has a pretty good idea about where a lot of it ended up. It's showing up in samples of the seafloor, between the well site and the coast.

"I've collected literally hundreds of sediment cores from the Gulf of Mexico, including around this area. And I've never seen anything like this," she said in an interview via satellite phone from the boat.

Joye describes seeing layers of oily material — in some places more than 2 inches thick — covering the bottom of the seafloor.

"It's very fluffy and porous. And there are little tar balls in there you can see that look like microscopic cauliflower heads," she says.

It's very clearly a fresh layer. Right below it she finds much more typical seafloor mud. And in that layer, she finds recently dead shrimp, worms and other invertebrates.

BP is planning to proceed with their "bottom kill" procedure once the relief wells are finished to allegedly put an end to their oil disaster. That won't make any difference, as I have written about in depth, since the oil and methane will continue to seep up from the ocean floor. But more evidence is coming in every day that oil did not magically disappear, as BP and Barry Soetorobama would like you to believe. The dispersants broke the oil into small globules, and these have now come back together but on the bottom of the ocean, not at the surface, since Corexit binds to oil and makes it heavier than water.

The real bottom kill is what BP has done to life in the Gulf of Mexico. All the small invertebrates are dead in the areas in which the oil has settled. Massive fish kills have been reported all over the Gulf, around the horn of Florida and up the East Coast to New England. 80-90% of the oysters sampled in Louisiana are dead. The damage will work its way up the food chain, and it already has in some areas. Several communities have already reported dead whales washing ashore on their beaches. People are getting seriously ill. There is Corexit being dropped into swimming pools by the rain. The oil disaster is far from over -- it has only begun.