thornhappy
Posts: 8596
Joined: 12/16/2006
Status: offline
|
The Santa Barbara Channel is home to a lot of oil wells, and there are natural seeps off the coast of Isla Vista (makes a real mess in the dorm showers), which deposit tar on the beaches north of Goleta. However, the marine environment has adapted to this relatively slow seepage.
The blowout in 1969 was no comparison to the oil seeps.
The fisheries in Prince William Sound never recovered. You can still find tar under the rocks on the beaches. If the oil in the Gulf hit the oyster beds, there's going to be trouble. A lot of oil made it into the estuaries, which are natural purifiers - until you dump a lot of crude in them all at once. There is little time to adapt to that, and the oil overwhelmed a lot of the oil-digesting microbes. They can't handle weathered crude.
|
RE: Purple looking jelly stuff, three feet thick, float... - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread