On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, dumping 134 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of 87 days. The spill has been called one of the worst environmental disasters in history, and is estimated to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of marine mammals and sea turtles, just under 1 million coastal birds, and probably millions of fish—though even now, more than a decade later, scientists are still unpacking the spill’s catastrophic impacts.
“It’s important to understand the true costs of an oil spill in terms of ecological damage so that we can appropriately weigh the decision of drilling in new locations,” says Lela Schlenker, a marine biologist at the Coastal Studies Institute at East Carolina University. At the time of the spill, oil and gas company BP was leasing the Deepwater Horizon oil rig from Transocean.
To that ...
