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"[[nid:10494]]Two years ago last week, on April 20, 2010, an explosion on the oil-drilling rig Deepwater Horizon caused the largest marine oil spill in history, gushing nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil over the course of three months.And, since then, researchers have been hard at work to understand how the oil spill impacted life in the Gulf of Mexico. It\u2019s too soon to say whether the ecosystem is out of the red \u2013 it\u2019s only been two years, after all! \u2013 but many researchers have been shocked at the ecosystem\u2019s recovery.\u201CLike everybody else, I had visions of just gobs and gobs of oil smothering thousands of acres of salt marsh,\u201D says James Morris, who studies marshland plants at the University of South Carolina. \u201CBut that didn\u2019t really happen.\u201DAs you can see in this slideshow, the marsh grasses are growing back despite being killed off two years ago by the oil. \u201CThe plants out there are really tough as nails,\u201D says Morris. \u201CAnimals will probably be more susceptible than the plants are, but plants, after all, are the foundation of the ecosystem. If the plants are there, the animals will come back.\u201D[[nid:10475]]While the Gulf is not oil-free, far less of the oil stuck around than scientists expected \u2013 thanks, in part, to oil-eating microbes. Because there are many natural oil seeps on the Gulf\u2019s seafloor, these microbes already called the Gulf home and were more than happy to feed on the new source of food introduced by the spill. The water in the Gulf is also very warm \u2013 especially compared to Alaskan waters, where the last major US oil spill occurred in 1989 \u2013 boosting the microbes\u2019 metabolisms and enabling them to gobble up the oil faster.These are good signs for the ecosystems as a whole, but it doesn\u2019t mean everything is coming up roses. Scientists still have much to learn: how long the oil will stay in the food chain; whether the coral communities will rebound; whether dolphins and other marine mammals will return; whether the fisheries \u2013 including the endangered Bluefin tuna -- will recover. And it\u2019s going to take more years of research to tease apart what changes are the results of the spill or dispersant chemicals used to clean up the spill, and which are just normal variations in the ecosystem.For example, soon after the oil spill, researchers noticed that the number of small fish in the Gulf had decreased pretty dramatically. At first they were worried: had the oil destroyed their nursing grounds? But it\u2019s also possible that the fishing ban, which went into effect soon after the spill, allowed predatory fish to rule the waters \u2013 snacking on every small fish in sight. It could be the nursing grounds, the fishing ban, some combination of the two, or other unknown factors.Only one thing is certain: that scientists need more time to fully understand the impacts of the oil spill. \u201CThere\u2019s still a lot we don\u2019t know about how this spill altered the food web of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem,\u201D says Samantha Joye, who studies marine chemistry and microbes at the University of Georgia. \u201CWe\u2019re trying to understand very complicated interactions and feedbacks in a dynamic, constantly-changing system, and it\u2019s going to take time.\u201DTo learn more about the oil spill, flip through this photo essay about what scientists have learned about the ecosystem's communities in the past two years. You should also check out this feature on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, published two years ago at the time of the spill, and watch these fabulous videos from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute about their research in the Gulf and how it's been affected by the spill."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://ocean.si.edu/blog/oil-spill-two-years-later>