Three Years Later Scientists Are Just Starting to Figure Out Where All the Oil Went

Three years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, scientists are still trying to understand where all the oil went; however, a new theory, presented by Florida State University's Jeff Chanton, is being hailed as the possible answer.

A professor of oceanography, Chanton spoke this past January at the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and Ecosystem Science Conference on the possibility of something he's calling a "dirty blizzard."

As Nature.com reports, Chanton is using the term to describe the phenomenon created when plankton and other particles bind together and fall from the ocean's surface.

The theory seems to fit, not only because it would explain the otherwise inexplicable disappearance of up to a quarter of the oil that was spilled, but because it would also explain the sudden absence of plankton that normally turns the water cloudy. Rather, in their place, scientists observed strings of particles falling at the time.

"There's something about that oil that just sucks everything out of the surface," Chanton said.

Sure enough, a biological oceanographer at the University of California Santa Barbara, Uta Passow, presented experiment results showing that weathered oil caused the particles to bind together, unlike the fresh oil samples she tried.

David Hollander further hypothesizes something he and his colleagues at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science are calling the "dirty bathtub" effect. In this theory, diffused oil from the spill was caught up in currents and carried throughout the Gulf.

Both theories together could account for as much as 30 percent of the oil.

The two theories are not without their critics, however.

Donald Boesch is the president of the University of Maryland's Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge and part of the U.S. commission tasked with investigating the spill.

Given the low levels of oil found in most sediment samples, Boesch states in Nature.com that he finds the theories "hard to believe."

However, if there's one thing everyone can agree on, it's that the full effects of the spill will only be understood with time.

Tracy Sutton, an ichthyologist from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, pointed out that the effects could even get worse with time.