Oil Spills

Nearly five years after the Deepwater Horizon explosion spilled roughly 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, scientists are still working to answer the question: Where did all the oil go?

A paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides a piece of the puzzle with an analysis of the oil that ended up on the seafloor, establishing its footprint, rough quantity and likely deposition mode, and pegging its source to that deep ocean plume of oil.

Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, mysterious honeycomb material was found floating in the Gulf of Mexico and along coastal…

A new study provides a composite picture of the environmental distribution of oil and gas from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon…

In a detailed assessment of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, researchers led by a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have determined that the blown-out Macondo well spewed oil at a rate of about 57,000 barrels a day, totaling nearly 5 million barrels of oil released from the well between April 20 and July 15, 2010, when the leak was capped. In addition, the well released some 100 million standard cubic feet per day of natural gas.

Taking another major step in sleuthing the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has determined what chemicals were contained in a deep, hydrocarbon-containing plume at least 22 miles long that WHOI scientists mapped and sampled last summer in the Gulf of Mexico, a residue of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

One year after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the northern Gulf of Mexico, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is unveiling a new multimedia website, Science in a Time of Crisis.