THEY seem to have vanished. Just two weeks after BP capped its broken Deepwater Horizon well, the plumes of dispersant and oil in the Gulf’s deep waters that were causing huge anxiety among biologists have gone away. Does that mean worries over ongoing ecological damage are overblown?
“We can’t find oil at the surface and, as of this week, we cannot find it deep down either,” says Terry Hazen, a microbial ecologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, whose research has focused on the area within 100 kilometres of the wellhead.
Hazen thinks he can explain why the…
