BP funding oil spill research center
WASHINGTON – Oil wasn’t the only thing that gushed after a well operated by BP exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. There was also a fountain of research.
In the five years since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig disaster, a scientific renaissance has blossomed in the Gulf, with thousands of researchers studying everything from crude-tolerant jellyfish to alligator stem cells.
Now, from a building overlooking Corpus Christi Bay, scientists and marine biologists are using part of a $500 million grant from BP to create a single database to house troves of information from the lawsuits, damage assessments and research endeavors to make sense of the oil spill.
“We’re looking at as much as three petabytes of data,” said Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, which is housing the data. “If you took all the books in all the libraries in all the universities in the United States, that’s one petabyte.”
The publicly available database, called the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative Information and Data Cooperative, is among the few positive developments to come from one the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. The spill sullied hundreds of miles of coastline, killed thousands of marine animals and birds, and polluted the deepest depths of the ocean floor.
The plan is intended to prevent what’s been the norm with previous oil spills: Researchers and funding flood a region in the immediate aftermath, only to gradually fade away, leaving little knowledge for posterity.
Some research that came from the Alaskan Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, for example, is scattered across the globe.
“I have some of it here,” said James Gibeaut, director of the Gulf database project, who also worked on the Alaskan spill, from his office in Corpus Christi. “This time there is a very serious effort to capture all the information and make it available.”
For 87 days in 2010, millions of barrels of oil flowed freely into the Gulf after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.