Many Small Oil Spills Are Larger Than We Thought

The Gulf of Mexico during Deepwater Horizon cleanup. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

While it's the big oil disasters like BP's Deepwater Horizon that get our attention, small and medium-sized spills happen frequently, too. Do we really know who much oil we're losing into the ocean? A new study of the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico, one of the world's most heavily drilled bodies of water, finds that authorities do a good job of tracking the total number of spills. But, the authors say, many of those smaller spills actually leak more oil than is reported.

Samira Daneshgar Asl of Florida State University used the school's database of high resolution satellite images?which are far superior to publicly available sat imagery, Nature News reports?to track the extent of small oil spills in the Gulf. In addition to tracking the spills reported to the U.S. Coast Guard National Response Center, she cooperated with non-profit environmental groups to find any spills that had gone unreported. Finally, she and her colleagues analyzed the images with a program that let them tell the difference in texture between seawater and oil to track the extent of spills.

The Florida State team found that most spills had, in fact, been reported to the Coast Guard. The size of the spills was consistently underreported, however, according to team leader Ian MacDonald, who called it "quite laughable." (This certainly brings to mind the Deepwater Horizon mess; early estimates pegged the leak at 1000 to 5000 barrels of oil per day, when in fact the spill caused an average of more than 50,000 barrels per day to enter the Gulf.)

MacDonald says that while it's quite difficult to get a perfect tally of something like an oil spill, where the amount of petroleum is hard to measure and constantly in flux, perhaps it's not surprising that oil spill totals are underreported. While oil companies can get in big trouble for not reporting spills, he tells Nature News that those companies don't appear to be punished when their estimate of a leak's size is way off.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/many-small-oil-spills-are-larger-than-we-thought-15031755?src=rss

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