Exxon Valdez's scandalous oil spill in 1989, causing 10 million gallons (about 40 million liters) of crude oil to spill into Prince William's pristine waters caused one of the largest environmental disasters in the calendar. American history.
While these oil spills are becoming more and more well known, the consequences and scale of natural oil spills on the ocean floor are also getting worse. A recent study showed that the amount of natural oil leaking in Santa Barbara, California is equivalent to about 8 to 80 times the amount of oil spilling out of Exxon Valdez for hundreds of thousands of years.
The oil scum makes an area of the sea surface covered with oil, contaminating the surrounding sediment. The oil content decreases in places away from the leak.
In hundreds of thousands of years, there were 20 to 25 tons of oil leaking from the seabed every day, at the natural point of Coal Oil Point (COP) in Santa Barbara. Oil spilled from natural fistula or human activity is formed from the decay of buried fossil remains. Over millions of years of heat and pressure, they are eventually transformed.
The co-author of the study, Dave Valentine, from the University of California, Santa Barbara said 'One of the natural problems is: What happened to all this oil?' 'A large amount of oil leaks floating on the sea surface. That is what we wonder for a long time. We all know that some of them will drift ashore in the form of asphalt tablets, however, they are not near the shore. And then, there are very large oil slicks. You can see them, sometimes oil spreads up to 32 km (20 miles) from the leak area. So what really happened? '
Based on previous research Valentine and his colleagues came up with the theory that oil had sunk to the bottom because it was too heavy.It is perfectly reasonable to assume that oil eventually sinks in the sediments because it is not present on the ground. It also does not dissolve into seawater, so it is almost certain that it is in sediment layers, " Valentine said.
The team took samples in locations around the leaks to find out how much oil was left after the "weathering" processes such as dissolving in water, evaporating into the air, or getting feces. canceled by bacteria.
Bacteria consume mostly, but not all, compounds in oil. The next step of the study is just to figure out why.
'Nature has done a wonderful job of oil. However, the problem is where bacteria stop eating, leave a small amount of compound in sediment, ' said study co-author Christ Reddy, co-author of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Mass. said 'The reason is still a mystery, however, we are approaching the answer.'
The support of the Energy Department, the Natural Science Foundation and the Seaver Institute for this study is detailed in the publication 'Technology and Environmental Science'.