So much for the environmental Apocalypse of 2010, or whatever it was that the greenies took to calling last April’s Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill.
First, it turned out that, just four months after the explosion, nearly all the oil that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico — once estimated at 200 million gallons — had disappeared with scant ill effect.
Now a federally funded field study in the journal Science reports that some 200,000 tons of toxic methane gas from the spill — which experts once estimated would remain in the gulf waters for as long as a decade — is also gone.
All praise Mother Nature.
Seems that naturally occurring bacterial microbes ate all the methane.
Says John Kessler, a chemical oceanographer at Texas A&M University and a study author: “We were caught off-guard.”
To be sure, the tree-huggers were quick to open fire on the report — as you’d expect, since they used the Deepwater Horizon spill to successfully pressure the White House to shut down offshore drilling in the gulf.
But it’s now clear that, as Dr. Judy McDowell of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute told this page last August, “The oil spill [has] definitely [been] blown out of proportion.”
Not to minimize the seriousness of the explosion — which killed 11 workers and injured 17 others — or the magnitude of the spill. (Though even that pales when you consider that the Gulf of Mexico contains 4.4 billion gallons of water for every gallon of leaked oil.)
Yet nature seems able to cope when disaster strikes.
That’s worth remembering — since, as long as the world remains dependent on petroleum, accidents will occur.
But this one turns out to have been much less than the cataclysmic event that the doomsayers, laughing up their sleeves, so somberly predicted.