Ghosts of the Gulf

Abstract

The 2010 BP (formerly British Petroleum) Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill was the largest environmental disaster in the history of the United States (Belanger et al. 2010). The Gulf of Mexico is one of the most important and biologically diverse environments in the world — a nursery for thousands of marine species, with numerous endemic organisms inhabiting its warm waters. Gulf seafood is an important source of food for millions of people in North America, and, since marine species migrate by following the Gulf Stream, people throughout Europe also rely on these fish for protein. From an ecological and economic standpoint, the DWH spill could not have occurred in a more disastrous location. The tremendous amount of oil that was spilled, estimated at 206 million gallons, resulted in an immediate kill zone that measured greater than 200 kilometers wide (Rabalais 2011; Ramseur and Hagerty 2013). It wiped out enormous numbers of marine life. During the cleanup, BP exacerbated the spill’s toxicity and reach by utilizing upward of 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants such as Corexit 9500, which made the effluents as much as 52 percent more toxic than the oil itself (RicoMartinez, Snell, and Shearer 2013); it also allowed them to be more easily dispersed. According to the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) for Corexit 9500, produced by the chemical manufacturer Nalco, no toxicity studies were conducted prior to its use in the gulf (Kujawinski et al. 2011). However, numerous earlier toxicology studies found such dispersants to be teratological1 to marine wildlife and possibly