Posted on behalf of Melissa Gaskill

On Monday 5 December, the 350 or so attendees at the State of the Gulf of Mexico Summit in Houston were among the first to hear of a $50 million, three-year commitment from the US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service for projects to improve water quality in the Gulf of Mexico.

The money will be used to help farmers and ranchers in seven priority river basins reduce run-off, improve water quality, and provide wildlife habitats. Called the Gulf of Mexico Initiative (GMI), it is part of the implementation phase of the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force‘s final strategy, also announced on Monday. President Barack Obama created the Task Force by executive order in October 2010 as part of long-term recovery following the Deepwater Horizon disaster (see Nature’s collection of stories on the spill).

Roughly $20 million will be allocated in the first year, said GMI spokesperson Jody Fagan. “We’ll see what the interest is and then decide how to allocate funding. There’s not a certain amount of funding to certain rivers.” Farmers and ranchers can apply for funds to support specific projects, such as prescribed grazing or pesticide management.

The seven priority areas are Weeks Bay on Alabama’s Fish River, Escambia River watershed in Alabama and Florida, Middle Suwanee River in Florida, Barataria-Terrbonne National Estuary and Mermentau Basin in Louisiana, Jourdan River in Mississippi, and the Lower San Antonio River in Texas.

“This is the first demonstration of a significant monetary commitment [for the Gulf] from the federal government,” said Cindy Brown, director of The Nature Conservancy’s Gulf of Mexico Program. “They are addressing a real problem and doing it now.” Nutrient inflow and water quality in Gulf estuaries are critical issues, with most of the Gulf’s 30 river basins imperilled, Brown added, affecting fisheries, drinking water, and recreation.

Billions of dollars in fines levied on companies involved with Deepwater Horizon would yet be directed towards Gulf projects, but that depends on pending legislation yet to be approved by Congress.

“As important economically as the Gulf of Mexico is, it doesn’t always get its fair share,” said William Hogarth, interim director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography. In fact, the $50 million award, according to the Task Force, represents a 1,100 percent increase in federal financial assistance for Gulf priority watersheds. “To see money come in is gratifying,” Hogarth said. “I hope that it will do some good.”

In the early months of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, scant attention was paid to the huge volume of gases that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, along with the estimated 62,500-68,000 barrels of oil per day.

Researchers report this week in Nature Geoscience that some 500,000 tonnes of gases – comprising roughly 40% of the total hydrocarbons – were discharged from the blown-out BP well. These gases could lead to small pockets of low oxygen in the waters surrounding the wellhead for years or even decades to come, the researchers say.

A previous study in Science concluded that the massive amounts of methane gas injected into the deep waters of the Gulf during the spill were devoured by microbes in a matter of months.

But Samantha Joye, a biogeochemist at the University of Georgia in Athens and lead author of the new study, says that her team detected gases at roughly 100 times background levels as late as December 2010, five months after the well was finally capped. Whereas previous teams sampled for gases largely in the southwest direction of the wellhead, the gases her group observed were in other regions, Joye says.

“I don’t think you can conclude based on the data available right now that all the gas is gone from the system,” says Joye. “Unlike the oil, gas doesn’t sediment to the bottom – it’s dissolved in the water and it floats around,” Joye adds. “So it’s not a problem that’s going to go away on a short time frame.”

Microbial consumption of gases in these areas was probably limited by a lack of key nutrients such as nitrogen, copper, and iron, which are in short supply in the deep waters of the Gulf, says Joye. In other words, microbial populations likely swelled to consume the feast of gases, but only until they ran out of the nutrients that they need for growth.

It is not yet clear whether low-oxygen zones will affect deepwater organisms, such as deepwater corals. Although pockets of low oxygen could persist for decades due to the slow turnover of deep waters, the size and magnitude of the problem does not compare to the seasonal “dead zone” in the Mississippi River basin, says Joye.

Posted on behalf of Amanda Mascarelli

In its final report, which was released today, the presidential commission investigating the Gulf Oil Spill called for scientists to play a more important role in the federal government’s decisions about where to allow offshore oil production and also in how the government responds to spills. At a press conference in Washington, DC, Bob Graham, a co-chair of the commission said “Science has not been given a sufficient seat at the table. Actually, I think that’s a considerable understatement. It has been virtually shut out.”

The commission asked Congress to supply more funding for scientific and environmental studies and to involve science agencies more formally in decisions about which areas should be opened to exploration. Specifically, the commission urged Congress to change the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to give the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration a formal role in assessing plans to lease offshore areas. The commission criticized the March decision by the Obama administration to expand areas available for exploration without consulting NOAA.

The commission also called for:

*More money for research in how to respond to oil spills.

*More research on dispersants, including their long-term effects on the environment.

*Faster access to oil spill sites by scientists so they can start independent studies.

*Plans by the Environmental Protection Agency to address human health impacts from large spills.

*Restoration efforts that are well funded and based on scientific research.

Relating to that last point, the commission requested that 80 percent of the penalties collected for violating the Clean Water Act should go to restoration efforts in the Gulf of Mexico

Looking ahead, the commission warned about exploration efforts off the coast of Alaska, particularly in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. These areas are biologically rich but there is relatively little scientific information about most of the species living there. And a spill in those regions would stretch the resources of the Coast Guard, which currently only has one operational ice breaker—a gap that has hampered scientific studies in the Arctic and Antarctic. The commission advised Congress to provide the Coast Guard with more resources and urged the government to carry out a comprehensive research program on oil spills in the Arctic.

Image: U.S. Coast Guard

Posted on behalf of Amanda Mascarelli

Gas-munching microbes had no trouble gobbling up the massive amount of methane released into the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill last year.

In addition to the three-quarters of a billion litres of oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico between April and July 2010, the broken wellhead also spewed roughly another 200,000 tonnes of methane into the ocean. Researchers report today in Science that bacteria that dined on the methane had entirely consumed the gaseous feast within a matter of months.

This finding came as a surprise to the researchers; when they initially surveyed the area surrounding the wellhead in June, the methane appeared to be breaking down quite slowly. And methane oxidation in the ocean is generally thought to occur over long timescales. Therefore the researchers initially speculated that the methane could hang around for a year or more, says David Valentine, a geomicrobiologist from the University of California in Santa Barbara and one of the lead authors of the study.

Valentine and his colleagues had planned to track the methane and study its fate when they returned to the spill site a couple of months later. But during research cruises from late August to early October, the team found that the methane had completely vanished, leaving an “oxygen sag” in its wake. This indicated that a bloom of methane-loving bacteria had been taking up oxygen in the surrounding water. They also found remnants of the bacterial community that had feasted on the methane.

In September, Valentine and his team reported in Science (based on data collected in mid-June) that bacteria were primarily gobbling up gases, rather than oil, and that the most easily degradable gases – propane and ethane – were being consumed first.

“After those were completely consumed the methane degraders were able to really get going,” says Valentine. “It seems like within fairly short order they grew and kept growing until there was no methane left.”

The team did not directly measure oil or the breakdown of oil. “There’s still a lot that we don’t know about the state of the oil,” says Valentine. “That’s going to be an ongoing process for years.”

The fact that bacteria quickly slurped up methane from the oil spill also has implications for the breakdown of methane from natural events. The work suggests that methane released from seeps, vents, or even from large-scale disruption of methane ‘clathrates’ – crystalline cages of bound methane gas – would also be quickly devoured by microbes.