Dr. Terry C. Hazen, the UT/Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor's Chair, gave a lecture titled "Can Mother Nature Take a Punch - The Gulf Oil Spill" Friday, March 9 at the UT Science Forum. Hazen spoke of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, subsequent oil spill, and clean up process.

"The Gulf Oil Spill is one of the largest ecological disasters of our time, and became an international issue during the summer of 2010." -Dr. Terry Hazen "The Gulf Oil Spill is one of the largest ecological disasters of our time, and became an international issue during the summer of 2010," Hazen said. However, the focus of Hazen's talk was to comment on the fact that Mother Nature can indeed take a punch--the Earth's natural processes did much more to clean up the spill than any human attempts.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, also known as the BP Oil Disaster, leaked an estimated 4,928,100 barrels of light crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico from April 20 to July 25, 2010.  Eleven men died in the explosion, and 6,147 birds, 613 sea turtles, 157 marine mammals were killed as of April 17, 2011 according to the US Fish and Wildlife Collection report.

"The Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 spilled only a fraction of the crude oil of the Deepwater Horizon spill but killed 250,000 sea birds, 22 killer whales, and 2,800 otters," Hazen said. The negative effects of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on the wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico were undesirable but weak in comparison to other spills that released much less oil into the environment. Hazen commented on his experience with the media and how photos of oiled birds and mammals publicized the devastation in the Gulf.

Physical and chemical processes such as evaporation, dissolution, dispersion, and photo-oxidation occurred in conjunction with the biological mechanisms involved in clean up processes.  All of these processes helped to quickly rid the Gulf of oil.

Hazen discussed the presence of oil-degrading bacteria in the Gulf which breaks down oil into carbon dioxide and water. Hazen's team of microbial ecologists worked in the Gulf during the summer of 2010, collecting samples from the surface and processing them in controlled laboratory conditions.

Two weeks after the Deepwater Horizon leak was capped and stopped (July 15, 2010), Hazen and his team could not find a presence of light crude oil anywhere on the surface. The oil had been degraded and dispersed actively in that short period of time, fitting the condition-controlled research from the lab.