Oil Spills in the Gulf of Mexico

By: Henry Armstrong

In today’s modern world, there are resources that we have geared

our society around that we simply can’t do without anymore. From

electricity to concrete, these resources are cornerstones to our ever

growing and changing world. But possibly above all other modern

resources, the one that we have made into our main driving resource is

oil. Even though we’ve tried to back further and further off the crutch of

oil, it is still a key resource in our continuously developing world. Now

oil itself is extracted in a variety of ways from a variety of locations, be

it creating underground fractures to free it up or simply drilling it

straight into a pocket. But in this essay, I will be focusing on oil drilling

in the ocean, which makes up roughly 37% of the world’s oil drilling,

and the event known as an oil spill. Oil spills are when crude oil is

spilled in some way or another, be it as serious as an oil tanker sinking

or an oil derrick breaking in some way, to being as simple as oil that

spills out of a pipe during refueling. It is in fact so commonplace that it

is referred to as petroleum input, and it is indeed estimated that in 2011,

the world’s total petroleum input was thought to be about 380,00,000

gallons, with a fifth occurring in the waters around the United States of

America. Furthermore, it is thought that the Gulf of Mexico absorbs

around 50,000,000 gallons of oil a year. Now the Gulf of Mexico is the

ninth largest body of water in the world as it receives water from 33

major rivers. In addition, almost half the basin is shallow intertidal

waters and the gulf supports major fishing from the United States of

America, Mexico and Cuba. Every year, all sorts of oil spills occur in the

gulf that make it reach 50,000,000 but there have been three major oil

spills that have occurred in the gulf: the Ixtoc I oil spill, which went

from June 1979 to March 1980, and the Taylor oil spill that occurred in

2004 and is still leaking to this day, making it one of the worst oil spills

in the Gulf of Mexico by volume. But the worst oil spill ever recorded in

the gulf was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. On April 20, 2010, the oil

drilling rig Deepwater Horizon in the Macondo Prospect exploded and

sank, thus resulting in the death of 11 workers and the largest oil spill in
the history of marine oil drilling. In total, 4,000,000 barrels of oil flowed

out into the gulf over 87 days, before it was finally capped on July 15,

2010. Despite it being capped over a decade ago, the effects of the oil

spill are still being felt today and the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico

will sadly never fully recover from this event, changing the way all

creatures, from birds to humans, live on the gulf forever. Now while this

tragedy and others will have lasting effects on the ecosystem, infecting

the soil, impacting breathing and so on, recent developments by

scientists have been used to help map and prevent oil spills, such as

GNOME, a live mapping software to map the trajectory of an oil spill,

live mapping software to determine if something is indeed an oil spill

and furthermore how to deal with it, as well as another mapping

software that helps determine thickness of a prospective oil spill. But

beyond oil spill mapping, there has been extensive research into the

effects of oil toxicity on organisms in the water, in particular sea turtles

and dolphins as these sea mammals will have different reactions to oil

than organisms that must breathe the water. Until we move away from

our dependency of oil, it appears that oil spills will be an ever increasing
reality of the world we live in, and there is a very real possibility that

there could be an oil spill worse than Deepwater Horizon in our future.

But if we can use these methods to effectively combat and limit the

effects of oil spills in our environment, then maybe we can battle against

this very real and dangerous reality of everyday life.

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