WASHINGTON — The 2010 BP oil spill left an oily “bathub ring” on the seafloor that’s about the size of Rhode Island, new research shows.
The study by David Valentine, the chief scientist on the federal damage assessment research ships, estimates that about 10 million gallons of oil coagulated on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico around the damaged Deepwater Horizon oil rig.
Valentine, a geochemistry professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara, said the spill from the Macondo well left other splotches containing even more oil. He said it is obvious where the oil is from.
Oil levels inside the ring were as much as 10,000 times higher than outside the 1,200-square-mile ring, Valentine said. A chemical component of the oil was found on the seafloor, from two-thirds of a mile to a mile below the surface.
The rig blew April 20, 2010, and spewed 172 million gallons of oil into the Gulf through the summer. Scientists are still trying to figure where all the oil went and what effects it had.
BP questions the conclusions of the study. In an e-mail, spokesman Jason Ryan said, “The authors failed to identify the source of the oil, leading them to grossly overstate the amount of residual Macondo oil on the seafloor and the geographic area in which it is found.”
