Excerpt
How dead is the Gulf of Mexico?
It is perhaps the most important question of the BP oil spill -- but scientists don't appear close to answering it despite a historically vast effort.
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This research has mainly occurred in the background, as public attention has focused on the "open-heart surgery" at BP's leaking wellhead.
The patient is a 600,000-square-mile sea, which contains swirling currents, sun-baked salt marshes and dark, cold canyons patrolled by sperm whales. Complicating matters is that even before the spill began in late April, the patient was already sick.
In recent years, Louisiana has been losing a football field's worth of its fertile marshes to erosion every 38 minutes. In the gulf itself, pollutants coming from the Mississippi's vast watershed helped feed a low-oxygen "dead zone" bigger than the entire Chesapeake Bay. Measuring the spill's damage, then, requires distinguishing it from the damage done by these other man-made problems.
So far, even the simplest-sounding attempts to measure the spill's impact have turned out to be complex.
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