Pockets of oil from the Exxon Valdez spill Persist Along the coast of Alaska

Small pockets of oil from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 still persist in pockets along the coast of Alaska, hidden rocks that kept the elements of destruction of crude oil, scientists reported yesterday ( 27 February). Exxon Valdez spill was not the biggest oil spill in US history to 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, with almost 11 million gallons ( 40 million liters) of oil pouring into Prince William Sound. (For comparison, the Deepwater Horizon spill spewed more than 200 million gallons, or 750 million liters of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.) In a study aimed at finding out how long the oil is retained after the spill, a team of scientists studied coastline Shelikof Strait southwest of the spill. They found oil pockets hidden behind stable boulders that seem to protect the oil from the action of waves and other forces that disrupt oil over time, keeping it in the same condition as when it was first spilled. "To have oil there after 23 years is remarkable," said Gail Irvine Alaska Science Centre, the US Geological Survey said in a statement. "We have these marked boulders, whose movements we have studied for over 18 years. Itself oil hardly stand it and looks like a 11 -day oil." Oil drilled from different places have different chemical fingerprints, and chemists were able to test unweathered oil and make sure that it came from Exxon Valdez, which was carrying oil from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. [SOS! Major oil disasters at sea] Christopher Reddy, whose lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts made a "fingerprint" of oil, said that the study showed something silver lining in the spill tanker Exxon Valdez, that scientists learn which compounds in petroleum or more less susceptible to weathering and where oil tends to persist after the spill. "One of the lessons is that if you are responsible for cleaning up the spill, you want to be proactive about cleaning behind boulders," Reddy said in a statement. The researchers, who presented their work yesterday at the annual Ocean Sciences Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Honolulu, did note that the amount of oil they found is a small fraction of the total oil spilled and that the findings do not necessarily be extended to the whole area of ​​the spill.