Scientists clash over how much oil remains in the Gulf

Nerdfight!

Today, at a hearing in Washington before the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, a scientific expert on oil spills butted heads with a leading government scientist over just how much oil remains in the Gulf in the wake of the BP oil disaster. It's the latest chapter in a seemingly endless debate over the overall impact of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion.

On one side, you had Florida State University oceanographer Ian MacDonald, who testified that he believes most of the estimated 4.9 barrels of oil from the spill weren't burned or skimmed by responders. Rather, he said, much of the remaining oil -- which, he reminded his listeners, remains "a highly durable material that resists further dissipation" -- was "buried in marine and coastal sediments. There is scant evidence for bacterial degradation of this material prior to burial."

On the other side you had Terry Hazen, a senior Energy Department scientist who responded to MacDonald's testimony by taking issue with the notion that the oil had anyplace to go but up.

"It did not sink all to the bottom," he said. "It can't."

Hazen is a prominent supporter of the theory that oil-eating microbes gobbled up most of the oil. However, other scientists insist that the microbes have been consuming gases released by the well, but not the oil.

MacDonald's testimony, meanwhile, echoes the findings of a research team from the University of Georgia, which recently announced that it had discovered a "slime highway" of oil up to two and a half inches thick on the Gulf floor. These deposits, the Georgia team reported, stretched out for miles from the site of the busted well. The group's leader, Samantha Joyce, said she'd "never seen anything like this" -- and noted that her team failed to find any living organism other than bacteria in the samples it took.

In an earlier phase of the debate, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently testified that the federal government's much-touted report finding that three-fourths of the oil in the Gulf had vanished -- and that, indeed, roughly three-fourths of the oil was still hidden in the Gulf.

In other news from the hearing: Former National Incident Commander Thad Allen said that federal officials were woefully unprepared to handle a spill of the magnitude of the BP disaster. Allen said that a number of key federal officials missed a mock oil spill exercise in March; the "unavailability of the principal people who would have learned most," he added, had hampered the effort in the early going.

Not all of today's committee disputes concerned the finer points of oil detection. William Reilly, the commission co-chairman and head of the EPA under George H.W. Bush, sought to establish the big picture in the hearings, saying that he'd been "amazed and disappointed" to learn that an "enormous effort" to mitigate the spill's impact ended up producing "very disappointing results."

(Photo via AP)