• Question: Hi, How much oil naturally seeps out of the sea bed in the golf of mexico in a year?

    Asked by cerijadex to MarkF, Mark, Michael, Panos, Sarah on 18 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Michael Loughlin

      Michael Loughlin answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      no idea i am afriad…but it does link in to how the mess will be cleaned up Oil , as you said, does seep naturally all the time..and bacteria have adapted to well basically eat oil as its full of C and H which is great.
      When an oil spill occurs what can help the clean up is bacteria eating the oil. Now if there are no usch bacteria near the oil slick , ones can be shipped in and dumped in the oil
      If there are some there..very often they are dividing like crazy but while they have enough C and H they need other elements like Nitrogen and phosphorous which are common in fertilizers..
      so in previous spills fertilizer has been poured into the slikc and helpoed speed up the oil break down to 5 times as quick as normal

    • Photo: Sarah Burl

      Sarah Burl answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      I am not sure anyone really knows the answer to this question but it is probably more than anyone would admit to!

    • Photo: Mark Travis

      Mark Travis answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      I really don’t have an idea about this one- I just know that it is considerably less than is currently leaking out unfortunately.

    • Photo: Mark Fogg

      Mark Fogg answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      I have no precise figure, but I read a news report about it this weekend, it’s millions of ‘barrels’ per year, about 12-14 million if I remember rightly. That’s why there are bacteria that have evolved to ‘eat’ oil in the oceans wherever oil seeps occur. They are sprinkling them on the slicks in the Gulf of Mexico to help clean up the horrendous mess. I ‘Tweeted’ this scientific American article about it a few weeks ago
      http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-microbes-clean-up-oil-spills

    • Photo: Panos Soultanas

      Panos Soultanas answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      from what I hear there ~20,000 barrels of oil being spilled every day. A barrel of oil is ~159 litres of oil so in 365 days there will be 365 X 20,000 X 159 = 1,160,700,000 litres. That’s a huge amount of oil. A real catastrophy for the environment and a real waste of oil.

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