Abstract
Excerpt: On April 20, 2010, a lethal explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil platform operated by British Petroleum (BP) in the Gulf of Mexico led to a gigantic fire and the spewing of an estimated 780,000 m3 (206 million gallons, or 4.9 million barrels) of oil into the Gulf. The story has been on international news almost every day since. The spill became an ever-changing footprint, expanding to an area of over several hundred km2 (Fig. 1) and leading to the shutdown of fishing in May 2010 of 118,000 km2 of the Gulf by the US government (Kerr et al., 2010). The well was finally capped by BP on July 15, 2010. In the meantime, a menagerie of government officials, scientists, engineers, and consultants have been describing, all with scarce data, the fate and impacts of the spill and actions we should be taking to deal with the spill and its aftermath.