Originally Posted by Robbie

I'm still looking at the Mexico spill from 1979. There isn't any trace of much of anything wrong there. And I never even heard of it until now. Even though I lived in Fla. then and was in the Gulf Of Mexico constantly and even in Mexico over at Cancun.

Why is it that all of that oil is gone and there was no "decades" of "consequences" from that one right there in the Gulf Of Mexico?

Also what about the biggest one that mankind has ever known: The Persian Gulf during the first Gulf War in 1992? That one just dwarfs this one.

Yet, I have never heard any environmentalists raising hell about it, and I don't hear of anything at all wrong with the waters or the sea life in that area.

Do the environmentalists cherry pick what they consider "newsworthy"? Or is it actually fact that these oil spills really don't have much long term impact? At least in warmer waters?

Originally Posted by wiki

The long term effects were very significant. There was no shoreline cleanup, essentially, over the 800 kilometers that the oil ? - in Saudi Arabia. And so when we went back in to do quantitative survey in 2002 and 2003, there was a million cubic meters of oil sediment remained then 12 years after the spill.... [T]he oil penetrated much more deeply into the intertidal sediment than normal because those sediments there have a lot of crab burrows, and the oil penetrated deep, sometimes 30, 40 centimeters, you know a couple of feet, into the mud of these tidal flats. There?s no way to get it out now. So it has had long term impact.