Deepwater Horizon

Mote Marine Laboratory was instrumental in the sea turtle rescue efforts during Deepwater Horizon and in honor of World Sea Turtle Day, June 16, Mote is excited to share some of the other work they do with sea turtles through their Sea Turtle Conservation & Research Program. Find out more about Mote’s work to monitor and protect nesting activity in southwest Florida — a hotspot for loggerhead sea turtles — in this day-in-the-life blog by Mote Senior Biologist Melissa Bernhard.

The Sea Grant oil spill outreach team has produced two new publications outlining what scientists know about the fate of that oil in the Gulf of Mexico environment. Those documents, Where did the oil go? A Deepwater Horizon fact sheet and Microbes and oil: What’s the connection? can both be viewed and downloaded at https://gulfseagrant.org/oilspilloutreach/publications/.

Eight years ago today, on April 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon Macondo oil well drilling platform tragically killed 11 workers, and started the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history, releasing millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

This blog covers information that will be presented by NOAA Office of Response and Restoration Senior Scientist Lisa DiPinto at the AAAS Conference this week. To check out other presentation topics, visit the AAAS Conference website.

Sea turtles are among the most popular marine reptiles and have been in Earth’s ocean for more than 100 million years. Unfortunately, today sea turtles struggle to survive. Of the seven species of sea turtles, six are found in United States waters and all of those species are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Imagine the perfect day at the beach, lying in the sand, fishing from the pier, maybe taking a boat out on the water. Then an oil spill occurs, and the beach is no longer a fun place to be.

Two popular marine animals—dolphins and sea turtles—are the focus of new publications from the Sea Grant Oil Spill Science Outreach Team. In the aftermath of the largest oil spill in history, many expressed concern about its impact on these long-lived, slow-to-mature creatures. Now, almost seven years after the spill, scientists have a better understanding of how they fared. The team examined this research, synthesizing peer-reviewed findings into two easy-to-understand outreach bulletins.

The environmental toll from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster was enormous, demanding a massive deployment of people and materials to measure the adverse effects.

Federal and state agencies worked quickly to scale up the emergency response, clean up the spill, mount a large-scale effort to assess the injuries to wildlife and other natural resources, and record how these lost resources adversely affected the public.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster spread spilled oil deep into the ocean’s depths and along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, compromising the complex ecosystem and local economies. The response and the natural resources damage assessment were the largest in the nation’s history.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill began on April 20, 2010, with a blowout of BP’s Macondo drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to the death of 11 men, the spill resulted in the largest mobilization of resources addressing an environmental emergency in the history of the United States.

The size of the spill required the Emergency Response Division to refine tracking subsurface oil, flowrate calculations, and long-term oil transport modeling. Data and information management became a paramount issue. NOAA’s web-based environmental management mapping tool proved invaluable in tracking and sharing data across the many teams and command posts.