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Nearly two years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the meticulous, long-term efforts of scientists finally yielded the official results: namely, that the brown, wilted, dying corals found at the Mississippi Canyon lease block 294 were indeed damaged by a plume of oil from the spill.
For many, it seemed a foregone conclusion. Back in December 2010, when news of the damaged corals first came out, their proximity to the leaking Macondo well seemed to be a “smoking gun” in its own right. What else could brown gunk (flocculent matter, if you are a scientist) covering damaged corals seven miles from the Deepwater Horizon site be, if not oil from the spill?
Yet, to this team of scientists, it was worth taking a closer look at the evidence with two-dimensional gas chromatography, sediment cores, coral samples, and mosaic imagery. Why? Because too much was at stake to base judgments on mere speculation.
In order to understand the damage in the deep, the scientists had to start by understanding what was down there to begin with. Read More
