Deepwater Horizon/BP

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill began on April 20, 2010, with a blowout of BP’s Macondo drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to the death of 11 men, the spill resulted in the largest mobilization of resources addressing an environmental emergency in the history of the United States. The size of the spill required the Emergency Response Division to refine tracking subsurface oil, flowrate calculations, and long-term oil transport modeling. Data and information management became a paramount issue ...

This blog covers information that will be presented by NOAA Office of Response and Restoration Senior Scientist Lisa DiPinto at the AAAS Conference this week. To check out other presentation topics, visit the AAAS Conference website.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill resulted in significant environmental harm over a large area of the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent shorelines.

A special issue of Marine Ecology Progress Series published Aug. 3, 2017, features 9 scientific articles summarizing the impacts of the oil spill on northern Gulf of Mexico shorelines and nearshore areas.  The scientific studies, conducted by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration authors and partners, document four key findings based on five years of data collection and study.

The 2010 Deepwater oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico revealed a challenge with the way scientific monitoring information is shared and stored.

At the time, the scientific records of monitoring efforts in the Gulf of Mexico were dispersed across many entities from universities, natural resource management agencies, private industries to non-governmental organizations. In most cases monitoring systems were developed independently, often narrowed to specific questions, such as how many oysters should be harvested and how many should be left in the water?