SLIME trail under the Gulf

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39150640/ns/us_news-environment/


Samples taken from the seafloor near BP's blown-out wellhead indicate miles of murky, oily residue sitting atop hard sediment. Moreover, inside that residue are dead shrimp, zooplankton, worms and other invertebrates.

"I expected to find oil on the sea floor," Samantha Joye, a University of Georgia marine sciences professor, said Monday morning in a ship-to-shore telephone interview. "I did not expect to find this much. I didn't expect to find layers two inches thick."


"It has to be a recent event," Joye said. "There's still pieces of warm bodies there."

If it is BP oil, it could undermine the federal government's estimate that 75 percent of the spill either evaporated, was cleaned up or was consumed by natural microbes.

What the scientists do already know is that the oil is not coming naturally from below the surface.

"What we found today is not a natural seep," Joye wrote in her blog on Sept. 5 when the first surprise sediment was found.

."The near shore sediments contained grayish muddy clay and a thin layer of orange-brown oil at the surface," she added. Oil seeping naturally would create an oily stain throughout the sediment cores, but these samples only had oil at the top.

"The oil obviously came from the top (down from the water column) not the bottom (up from a deep reservoir)," Joye wrote.

'Slime highway'
The researchers also have a name for it: a slime highway.

That's because they're confident much of the oil was trapped by mucus coming from microbes that feast on oil in a natural process that helps break up the contaminant. Those microbes are well documented, but not that their mucus was sinking along with oil to the seafloor.

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