From the University of Rochester , those darned bacteria are ruining the eco photo-ops. Video follows.
At least 200,000 tons of oil and gas from Deepwater Horizon spill consumed by gulf bacteria
Researchers from the University of Rochester and Texas A&M University have found that, over a period of five months following the disastrous 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, naturally-occurring bacteria that exist in the Gulf of Mexico consumed and within five months removed at least 200,000 tons of oil and natural gas that spewed into the deep Gulf from the ruptured well head.
The researchers analyzed an extensive data set to determine not only how much oil and gas was eaten by bacteria, but also how the characteristics of this feast changed with time.
“A significant amount of the oil and gas that was released was retained within the ocean water more than one-half mile below the sea surface. It appears that the hydrocarbon-eating bacteria did a good job of removing the majority of the material that was retained in these layers,” said co-author John Kessler <http://www.ees.rochester.edu/people/faculty/kessler_john/index.html> of the University of Rochester.
The results published this week in Environmental Science and Technology http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es301363k include the first measurements of how the rate at which the bacteria ate the oil and gas changed as this disaster progressed, information that is fundamental to understanding both this spill and predicting the behavior of future spills.
Kessler noted: “Interestingly, the oil and gas consumption rate was correlated with the addition of dispersants at the wellhead. While there is still much to learn about the appropriateness of using dispersants in a natural ecosystem, our results suggest it made the released hydrocarbons more available to the native Gulf of Mexico microorganisms. ”
Their measurements show that the consumption of the oil and gas by bacteria in the deep Gulf had stopped by September 2010, five months after the Deepwater Horizon explosion. “It is unclear if this indicates that this great feast was over by this time or if the microorganisms were simply taking a break before they start on dessert and coffee” said Kessler. “Our results suggest that some (about 40%) of the released hydrocarbons that once populated these layers still remained in the Gulf post September 2010, so food was available for the feast to continue at some later time. But the location of those substances and whether they were biochemically transformed is unknown.”
Previous studies of the Deepwater Horizon spill had shown that the oil and gas were trapped in underwater layers, or “plumes”, and that the bacteria had begun consuming the oil and gas. By using a more extensive data set, the researchers were able to measure just how many tons of hydrocarbons released from the spill had been removed in the deep Gulf waters. The team’s research suggests that the majority of what once composed these large underwater plumes of oil and gas was eaten by the bacteria.
Professor John Kessler, recently appointed as Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of the University of Rochester, worked with graduate research assistant Mengran Du at Texas A&M University to analyze over 1300 profiles of oxygen dissolved in the Gulf of Mexico water spanning a period of four months and covering nearly 30,000 square miles.
The researchers calculated how many tons of oil and gas had been consumed and at what rate by first measuring how much oxygen had been removed from the ocean. Mengran Du explained that “when bacteria consume oil and gas, they use up oxygen and release carbon dioxide, just as humans do when we breathe. When bacteria die and decompose, that uses up still more oxygen. Both these processes remove oxygen from the water.” Du added that it is this lower oxygen level that the researchers could measure and use as an indicator of how much oil and gas had been removed by microorganisms and at what rate.
The work was supported by the National Science Foundation with additional contributions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Sloan Foundation, BP/the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, and the Chinese Scholarship Council.
The deeper layers of the Gulf may have looked something like the home aquarium experiencing a bacterial bloom, and just like with that bacterial bloom, as suddenly as it begins it ends when either the nutrients that produced it are metabolized or the bacteria in question are eaten or they poison themselves with their own excretions. If not all the oil was eaten, then it was probably one of the last two, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It just means the system is settling back towards equilibrium.
Life from petroleum: http://living-petrol.blogspot.com/
What is the consequence of 200,000 tons of bacteria poo on the Gulf environment?
As far as I know, the USS Arizona is still seeping oil 70 years after she went down. Where’s it all gone?
Isn’t another name for dispersant, detergent.
There are about 40 genera of oil eating bacteria in the Gulf. I don’t know that we can translate this information about oil spills to the north slope. It is a different kind of crude and the bacteria may not be the same and probably would not act as quickly due to he low water temperature.
I believe BP tried to point this out but it only made the administrations push their boot even harder to their throat.
Amoco Cadiz oil spill offers optimism when follow up 15 years after that disaster. The marsh which was compulsively cleansed counter-intuitively had it’s area original area of vegetation at +/- 30% less ; whereas the contaminated marsh not cleaned up had it’s original area of vegetation increased +/- 21% (Mar Pollut Bull vol. 30, issue 12: 780–787).
Spills are worked on by micro-organisms that utilize nitrate as electron acceptors as well as oxygen. Dispersants set up more biofilms & in biofilms microbial horizontal gene transfers can occur.
man in a barrel says:
September 11, 2012 at 4:11 pm
No, it’s not possible to know the answer to a misplaced question. You see, bacteria are responsible for replacing damage with clean water. Your question is asked as though the bacteria had not acted. So really, you’re seeming to be looking for something to be worried about.
Bernd Felsche says:
September 11, 2012 at 7:06 pm
Oxygenation sounds suspiciously like geoengineering based on the postulation that the bacteria need a minimum oxygen level. The ocean contains every range of aerobic to anaerobic organism. No need to worry.
Nice to wake up to a bit of good news for once – I’d been vaguely intending to ask how the Gulf was doing these days and now I don’t have to. Bacteria are amazing, it sometimes seems there’s nothing that doesn’t have a bacterium to eat it. Not sure about that “dessert and coffee” quote though – my instant mental picture was of overfed bacteria lying back like bloated cartoon characters, with hugely distended bellies and emitting belches on a royal scale. Did no-one see the bubbles? 🙂
aaron says:
September 11, 2012 at 5:20 pm
This is why it baffles me that people are concerned about arctic drilling spills.
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It’s a lot colder in the Arctic (Duh). Probably a different bacterial suite and very likely slower growing. Some oil from the Exxon Valdez in Cook Inlet is said to be still around and in depressingly undeteriorated condition after more than two decades. Sure bacteria will eat Arctic oil spills … eventually. The question is how long is eventually. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/03/090323-exxon-anniversary.html
I love bacteria (and archaea), so varied and versatile, and making up 50% of total biomass on the planet. We have so much to learn still. I even love at least studying salmonella and other bugs that occasionally give me grief here in Mexico. But I hope that recognising that bacteria can help clear up human pollution won’t lead to a Gaia-gooey overconfidence, that whatever we do can be dealt with by ‘Mother Earth’.
I just wrote that without really thinking through the idea, it just came out; but, I wonder (now reflecting a bit), isn’t the confidence that we can do what we like, and Nature (or however we conceptualise the systems that we live in) will adapt, rather similar to Lovelock’s hypothesis of Gaia as a self-sustaining, quasi-live entity? I don’t accept Lovelock’s scientific formulation of ‘Gaia’, still less the eco-mystic versions that derived from his work. But it’s easy to fall into that mode of thinking, and so not recognise serious damage to ecosystems (as Tom Jones says, what about the 950,000 tons of hydrocarbons that the bacteria appear not to have eaten yet?).
I said this at Jeff Id’s a few weeks after the blowout. The whole bottom of the Gulf is probably one big sulfur deposit due to the oil seeps and other organic matter feeding the SRB’s, who extract oxygen out of sulfate out of the seawater and excrete H2S which then oxidises to sulfur. Five years after the similar Ixtoc-1 blowout you were hard pressed to see any effect at all. The main difference with that event is that Pemex is owned by the Mexican government, so when asked to compensate people they politely said ‘get lost’.
Exxon Valdez was a different beast because bacteria don’t like cold.
When the Budel zinc smelter people started up their SRB effluent treatment plant all they did was go down to the estury, fill a bucket with mud and dump it into the reactor and wait. Natural selection did the rest. Same here.
When the “disaster” was in progress I saw an interview with a microbiologist on the BBC. They were discussing how bacteria would clean up the remaining oil, and he said that the problem for the bacteria was that it was limited by the availability of iron, and that adding iron supplements would dramatically improve the clean up rates.
The BBC person asked if this information has been passed on to the people in charge of the cleanup, and he said that he had tried unsuccessfully to get anyone to listen to him ;(
..”When if fact the economic impacts were positive as the oil apparently acted like a fertilizer“..
That’s right OCB. I was once severely admonished by the caretakers of the caravan park where I was living back in ’86 for dumping my sump oil on a barely grassed, sandy area being converted to more spaces.
After having seen the glorious fertilising results of people trying to keep the grass at bay around their caravans by spraying sump oil (they should have used diesel), I observed that after about 2 months of toxicity, the oil biodegraded and became great fertiliser.
I foretold to the caretakers that in a few months this would be the greenest patch on their precious black sand of death. Naturally, I had to point this out when my quatrain revealed itself several weeks later. I’d always told them to use diesel to control rampant grass. I think they finally got the message.
Hydrocarbons are a great energy source as we know and, adding further carbon, sulphur and nitrate compounds to oil by running it in an engine only serves to make it better for the environment.
The moral is that one creature’s pollution is another creature’s lunch.
If fertilizer run-off in the Mississipi causes a dead zone in the Gulf, how much does US rainfall affect the ability of bacteria to eat an oil spill?
On a side issue, it was President Obama’s continuing use of the term British Petroleum, despite the company being largely US owned and called BP for years previous, that made me realise what a light-weight you had for a president. As long as he could divert attention from his own administration’s faillings he kept up the show of righteous indignation at a ‘foreign’ company. Perhaps to borrow one of the techniques he used, all wind turbines should have a web cam pointed at them so everyone can see how often they’re turning.
Thanks Bruce for mentioning the PEMEX spill. The Deepwater blowout is touted as “the worst spill” but only for US waters, not for the Gulf. The PEMEX blowout was far larger and ran for much longer. Two years after capping the ‘evidence’ was basically gone.
TimTheToolMan says:
September 11, 2012 at 5:40 pm
“So they’re using a proxy for approximating bacterial activity and hence oil consumed and that proxy tells them 40% of the oil remains but they dont know where it is. I suspect its taken up residence with the missing heat.”
Hmmm. . . .up to 9 light years from earth? What kind of alien bacteria is this! 😉
“…..adding further carbon, sulphur and nitrate compounds to oil by running it in an engine only serves to make it better for the environment.”
Olaf, not sure I’d go that far considering the heavy metals that accumulate in motor oil from the fuel additives and bearing wash.
Interesting press release here on the subject of microbes and oil, dating back to 1999. I copy some excerpts below. I like the phrase “surface chauvinism”
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http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Jan99/gold.book.deb.html
CORNELL News
Cornell astronomer looks at our deep hot biosphere and finds it teeming with life , and controversy
FOR RELEASE: Jan. 26, 1999
ITHACA, N.Y. — The ideas come crowding in: Deep within the Earth’s crust is a vast ecosystem of primitive bacteria nurtured by a reservoir of hydrocarbons of unimaginable size, much of it untapped. Even more: The microbes predate all of the planet’s other life forms, existing even before photosynthesis became the preferred life-giving form.
In a new book, The Deep Hot Biosphere (Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, $27), Cornell Professor emeritus of astronomy Thomas Gold argues that subterranean bugs are us — or at least they started the whole evolutionary process
[…]
Founder and director of Cornell’s Center for Radiophysics and Space Research for two decades, Gold is hardly a stranger to sticking his neck out. He has been proven right in such diverse realms as a theory of hearing, the interpretation of pulsars and a theory of the Earth’s axis of rotation.
But Gold’s most controversial idea, as physicist Freeman Dyson notes in the book’s forward, is that of the nonbiological origin of natural gas and oil, which he first proposed more than 20 years ago. These hydrocarbons, Gold postulated, come from deep reservoirs and are composed of the material from which the Earth condensed. The idea that hydrocarbons coalesced from organic material is, he says, quite wrong. The biological molecules found in oil, he avers, show only that the oil is contaminated by microbes, not that it was produced by them.
Some researchers, and in particular petroleum geologists, have taken issue with Gold’s proposal. They are likely to be even more put out by his new book, which says that these microbes populate the Earth’s interior down to a depth of several miles and that everything we see living on the planet’s surface is only a small part of the biosphere. The greater part, and the ancient part, is very deep and very hot.
Indeed, Gold shows irritation at a scientific community that “has typically sought only surface life in the heavens.” Scientists, he writes, “have been hindered by a sort of ‘surface chauvinism.'”
The heavens?
Absolutely, says Gold. “Spectroscopic evidence is very strong for many planetary bodies. The prime example is Titan [a moon of Saturn], which has clouds of ethane and methane. They interchange with the surface, so there must be lakes or oceans of liquid ethane or methane. Once you know that, it’s clear they came outside from the body within.”
[…]
On Earth, says Gold, there is clear evidence that subsurface microbial life still exists; for example, in the discovery of primitive microbes in hot ocean vents. “We pulled up bugs from five kilometers down in the granite in Sweden. They were perfectly alive and probably the earliest life form on the planet,” he says. The primitive microbes, he notes, are thermophiles and hyperthermophiles, heat-loving archaebacteria.
Photosynthesis, his book argues, “developed in offshoots of subterranean life that had progressed toward the surface and then evolved a way to use photons to supply even more chemical energy.” When surface conditions such as temperature and liquid water became favorable to life, surface life was able to blossom.
[…]
In the eons since, the deep world of microbes has had to rely on chemical energy, the oxidation of hydrocarbons, ranging from methane to petroleum, as the organisms emerge upwards from deep reservoirs below. “Every oil-bearing region in the world must have large amounts of microbiology,” he says.
Writes Gold: “In my view, hydrocarbons are not biology reworked by geology (as the traditional view would hold) but rather geology reworked by biology. In other words, hydrocarbons are primordial, but as they upwell into Earth’s outer crust microbial life invades.”
[…]
Of course this result is not a surprise – many people said this many times during and just after the spill – but with the best will in the world, how much do you think the media wanted to publish a “move along, nothing to see here” story during this time? What we have now is peer-reviewed (yes, I know, but we still have to use it until we get something better) quantification of how bacteria do it. This will be cited in future reports and should be included in future oils spill clean up plans.
A bit OT but has anybody else heard that the EU has announced that Bio-Fuels are no longer PC especially when food supplies are short they seem to want to remove all subsidies can this be a retreat of sorts??
Bob Layson says:
September 12, 2012 at 2:19 am
The moral is that one creature’s pollution is another creature’s lunch.
My dog knows that only too well!