Drilling a release well finally did the job of stopping the flow of oil. Deepwater Horizon is still spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, even though BP has succeeded in inserting a smaller pipe into the main leakage to suck off part of the flow.

When the BP oil spill happened, I was working at MIT, and I was in charge of developing an oil spill cleaning technology.

An American Oil Spill

They're very important in oil spills.

It also makes it very viscous.

So oil and petrochemicals are not just a problem where there's a spill they're a problem where there's not.

I created a little oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

I think this latest oil spill in the Gulf is a reminder.

Now, in the Exxon Valdez spill, about 30 percent of the killer whales died in the first few months.

One of the things that happened with the two previous oil spills was that we really worked on some of the symptoms.

The global companies operating in the delta have spilled oil and flared natural gas for decades, without regard for the natural environment and the communities impoverished and poisoned by their actions. One estimate puts the cumulative spills over the past 50 years at approximately 10 million barrels twice the size of the BP spill.

On the top line, this is the BP oil spill billions of barrels of oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico.

People got very upset when the BP oil spill happened for very good reason.

I mean, we've essentially been exporting oil spills when we import oil from places without tight environmental regulations.

And so, cognitive dissonance is part and parcel of the way that we deal with oil, and it's really important to dealing with this oil spill.

Tank washing gave rise to a huge number of small spills, and tanker accidents such as those involving the Torrey Canyon, Exxon Valdez, Metula, and St. Peter resulted in huge, concentrated spills. Blowouts were not infrequent, but most occurred on land or in shallow water, and most could be stopped relatively easily.

Carl Safina The oil spill's unseen culprits, victims

This is why these moments of these oil spills are so important.

If it sank, it would be a whole different story as far as an oil spill.

So the thing about water oil spills is that they are very politically galvanizing.

Luckily still, it seems to be out of harm's way of the recent oil spill.

They were all on the Gulf in May, while oil was starting to come ashore in certain places.

I mean, these pictures this is from the Santa Barbara spill.

Gambling site lets users bet on which species will go extinct because of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

When the Santa Barbara spill happened in 1969, it formed the environmental movement in its modern form.

We tend to think of oil spills and mercury and we hear a lot about plastic these days.

VIENNA On April 20, an explosion on Deepwater Horizon, a British Petroleum (BP) operated oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, led to the most publicized oil spill in decades. Another blowout in the same waters 31 years ago, farther south on the Mexican side of the Gulf, turned into the largest peacetime oil spill ever.

The platform where that accident happened, called Ixtoc 1, was operated by Pemex, the state owned Mexican oil company. The two accidents and the spills they caused have a number of similar features, although marine oil spills in general have profoundly changed in character in the three decades between the two events.

These include the 1983 Nowruz oil spill and other events during the Iran Iraq war the operation of oil platforms, terminals and oil processing facilities as well as natural seeps in the Persian Gulf.

The data are uncertain there have been many thousands of spills during this period often poorly documented and their magnitude hidden or simply unmeasured by either the companies or the government. Indeed, just as BP was being hit with new criminal penalties, ExxonMobil announced yet another pipeline leak in the Niger Delta.

After telling ourselves for so long that our tools and technology can control nature, suddenly we were face to face with our weakness, with our lack of control, as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it top hats, top kills and, most memorably, the junk shot the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world.

That has been the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every year since 1969.

Bangladesh would be particularly vulnerable to the devastating effects of a major oil spill.

More than 5,250 feet of coastline were affected and dead marine species were found during clean up efforts.

So while the oil spill, the leak, the eruption, is a catastrophe, I think it's important to keep in mind that we've done a lot to affect what's in the ocean for a very, very long time.

So I'm going to talk to you about you about the political chemistry of oil spills and why this is an incredibly important, long, oily, hot summer, and why we need to keep ourselves from getting distracted.

So I quit my dream job, and I moved to New Orleans, and I kept on studying how the oil spill was happening.

As with BP, the hole does get plugged, at least temporarily, but not before exacting a tremendous price.

It turns out that oil spill is a mostly white conversation, that cookout is a mostly black conversation.

That battle was lost in 1980, when the United States Supreme Court decided that a genetically modified micro organism designed to clean up oil spills could be patented. (Obviously, given the damage caused by the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, there is still some work to be done on that particular organism.)

In both cases, efforts were made to burn off the oil from the ocean s surface. But, as the 1967 Torrey Canyon experience showed the stranded tanker was bombed with napalm oil on water doesn t burn well, and the emulsified oil called chocolate mousse hardly burned at all.

A United Nations expert group that I led put the figure significantly higher. Similarly, whereas BP has been using a release figure of 800 tons per day From Deepwater Horizon, estimates by independent experts are many times higher.

And we can wrap our heads around the spills, because that's what we see here, but in fact, these guys actually live in a war zone.

Beaches, mostly in Mexico but to some extent also in the United States, were hit, and birds succumbed in large numbers, despite the dispersion efforts. Because of the dispersion, shrimp, squid, and some fish populations suffered, with fisheries hit even harder.

Concerned about the oil spill from the oil tanker that sank thirteen nautical miles off the south western coast of the Province of Guimaras in the central Philippines on 11 August 2006, resulting in that country's unprecedented maritime ecological disaster,