In a deep, dark part of the Gulf of Mexico, the number of marine animals plummeted by about 60% in the years following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, a new study found.
In a crucial part of the Gulf between the light surface and the darkest depths, where the BP-operated well failed and dumped 134 million gallons of oil, the number of fish found dropped by 63.5% from the year after the spill to 2015. Crustaceans, including shrimp and krill, a key food for whales, went down 62%, and larger animals like squid and octopuses fell 59.7%, according to a study published Monday in the journal PNAS.
And those populations haven’t come close to recovering, the study found.
This means if they want to drill more in the future the probably won’t be as much “pesky” life forms they need to keep safe.
Wait, you’re telling me if you put oil water that sea life can’t handle that?
Oil is a good start, but you need to potentiate the toxic properties of the oil and spread it throughout the water column with Corexit to ecocide like the best of ‘em.
No surprise, really. That was a bad spill
Corexit was the dispersant they used in the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon spill. It’s awful in so, so many ways.
I did a research paper on notable ocean oil spills, and let me tell you, there were many. Deepwater horizon was where my research started
The part that will get lost in the Corexit thread: this study is the bathypelagic zone, the deep middle water, not the surface slick everyone remembers. That zone runs on a different clock. The animals down there are long-lived and slow to reproduce, so a 60-63% drop is not a dip you wait out, it is a reset. And the dispersant line matters here too: Corexit did not just break the oil up, it helped shuttle a lot of it downward as marine snow, onto the seafloor communities with the least capacity to absorb it.
Gulf of America now buddy
I bought some BP stock at that low. I knew. I fucking knew there would be no real consequences.
I would have been ecstatic to lose every single dime I put into that. That was built into the plan. I could lose that money and be ecstatic , or I could be dejected, but at least dejected with a little bit of money to show for it.
I bet on my skepticism of having a healthy, functioning government. If investors had lost everything, other investors would have begun to value safety and regulatory compliance a little more.
As it is, even if it’s the company itself that blows up instead of the common good, they can just expect a bailout.
Did that not make you feel bad? I’d feel bad making a profit off death, even if it was going to happen anyways
You could think of it as taking profit away from someone else who would have owned and traded the stock. Basically a scalper for unethical stock
