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Originally Posted by machinehead
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Indeed. Not mentioned in the wikipedia article however, is that much the oil from the Ixtoc oil spill didn't actually go anywhere. Most of it sunk to the bottom of the seafloor and resides within the sedimentation.
I am still somewhat dubious as to what will happen with the majority of the oil from the Deep Horizon well. Part of me thinks it'll be a repeat of Ixtoc by and large. But there is far too much uncertainty. Again the media loves to jump on worst case scenarios predicted by models (i.e. all of the coasts are screwed). I'm not quite so certain, time will tell. Granted I haven't followed closely within the last few days, so I could be wrong.
As for this whole political debate that this thread got turned into... I think all of those points are by and large unfounded. I don't understand how people can make the connection and say that this is "Obama's Katrina." To me that is a positively stupid assertion to make. The fact of the matter is BP really screwed this one up. There may have been some governmental shenanigins in terms of safety procedures between BP and regulatory bodies. I expect investigations to yield those results. But this is by and large BP's own doing, and I don't understand how people can reasonably assume that the government could have acted sooner to somehow mitigate the damage. ~17k barrels of oil were spewing out each day, there is next to nothing you can do to contain that. The best thing you can do is hope that BP fixed the problem. BP more than anyone wants to stop the flow, and they have many brilliant minds working to try to stop it. Although I'm pretty certain those minds have probably the most miserable lives since this fiasco started.