Oil in our Oceans

Oil spills are a form of pollution and they get very little media coverage when you compare them to that of plastic or Carbon Dioxide pollution. The effects of oil spills can be long lasting and very difficult to recover from, and this is why we need to actively prevent and reduce the number of incidences per year. This can help save the plants and animals in our oceans and gradually head towards happier and healthier seas. I’m writing this blog post because I feel that it is time that we, as a society, focus more of our attention onto this serious issue and look at how we can tackle this head on, ensuring that we are making an impact and putting our environment’s status at a higher priority than our (often selfish and ignorant) actions.

Between 2010 and 2018, there were 59 oil spills of 7 tonnes or more, which adds up to 163,000 tonnes of oil that has been spilt into our seas over an 8 year period. 92% of this originated from just 10 spills. Since oil and water don’t mix, this oil doesn’t exactly disappear; it will stay on the surface of the ocean until it is eventually broken down or cleared up. This just highlights that the impacts of these oil spills are long term and have a global scale. These oil spills happen, normally by accident, when equipment breaks down, or careless mistakes are made, or strong weather events damage the tankers or barges. Even though people always think of man-made incidents when discussing topics like this, oil spills can also be due to natural causes such as tectonic events. However, I am going to be using the largest accidental oil spill in human history as a case study to explore what can realistically cause these incidents and what the impacts are; the BP oil spill of Deepwater Horizon in 2010.

This spill started in the Gulf of Mexico on the 20th of April 2010 due to natural gas being blasted through a cement wall that was used to seal a well at the Deepwater Horizon oil platform. This gas traveled up the rig to the platform where it caught on fire. As a consequence of this fire, 11 workers were killed and 17 were injured, and two days later the platform capsized and sank. At the time, the well was not capped and thus oil was leaking out with no platform to contain and monitor it. Shockingly, this well was not capped until many months later (September 17th 2010) and by this time, the damage had already been done. 134 million gallons were leaked into the ocean and this coated 1,300 miles of the American Gulf coast with oil. Many could argue that there are a lot of different people to blame for a large scale incident like this, but the law could only find one culprit: BP. They had to pay 65 billion U.S. dollars to compensate for the people whose livelihoods relied upon the newly damaged gulf.

This case study led me to consider the direct and indirect impacts of such wide scale oil spillage and how this can be prevented from happening in the future. Obviously, one of the visible impacts of the spill was damage to the coastlines between Texas and Florida, and an example of this is that one quarter of the Louisiana coastline was coated with oil, as all of the oil that was spilled into the sea has since come to the shore, thus shifting the issues onto the coastline, moving the focus from marine life to terrestrial life, including the health of the people living in and around this large area. Talking about human health, one of the potential hazards of the spill was that it is located in a hurricane corridor, which means that there was a greater risk of the oil spreading further around the world but also that it could have become airborne and negatively impacted humans all around the globe. It is clear that this oil has definitely spread far, also due to the “Loop Current” in the Gulf of Mexico. This current flows through the Gulf, around the Florida Keys and East Coast, and also around Cuba and the Yucatan, which spread the boundaries of worry far and wide. However, it is much less clear if the oil became airborne or not and how many people it affected, either directly or indirectly. One thing that has been noticed is that the numbers of people getting sick increased after the spill in the Gulf, and one could argue that this correlation is suggestive of causation.

However, one of the most noticeable effects of the spill is the depletion in animal life. Within 6 months of the spill, over 8,000 animals had died and many of which were already on the endangered list. 150 endangered sea turtles and over 300 sea birds were also killed by the oil. On top of this, the amount of shrimp that was considered to be inedible increased due to the chemicals that were spilled during the accident, which also would have dramatically impacted the fishing industry and local economy in these regions.

Even though these statistics and facts all sound depressing and sad; please don’t lose hope. This is one of the most extreme oil spills in history and this is right at the far end of the spectrum in terms of severity of impacts. It did adversely affect marine, animal, and human life in varying ways and intensities, but this was almost ten years ago now. Our planet is slowly recovering. If we work hard to prevent such large scale incidents from happening in the future then we have lots to be hopeful about. Even if we only changed the speed at which we reached and sealed these wells, there would be hundreds of animals surviving due to quicker reaction times and proactive attitudes. Use this case study as a cautionary tale; let’s take the past and change the future by learning from it.