Oil-Eating Microbes Consume Oil Plume
It’s no doubt the massive oil spill in the Gulf was the worst we’ve ever seen and has destroyed much of the ecosystem of the area including companies that depend on the health of the area in order to continue to conduct business. However, scientists have found that petroleum-eating bacteria was plentiful in the clouds of oil that drifted for months following the April 20th incident.
This bacteria which has been consuming oil seeping from the seafloor for ages seems to have increased their own metabolic machinery to consume more of the oil quite efficiently. The result has been a natural cleanup mechanism that can reduce the amount of oil by half about every three days or so.
The results of the study come from Terry C. Hazen and a team of scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and help to explain one of the mysteries of the disaster – Where did all the oil go?
“What we know about the degradation rates fits with what we are seeing in the last three weeks,” Hazen said. “We’ve gone out to the sites, and we don’t find any oil, but we do find the bacteria.”
More on the oil-eating microbes here.
Image Credit: Shutterstock
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