Bacteria Cleaned Up Methane Released by BP Oil Spill

Hungry underwater microbes devoured nearly 200,000 tonnes of the hydrocarbon and helped avert a wider disaster, scientists say.

A day after a White House commission released a damning report on the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, scientists reported that the environmental damage the accident caused would have been a lot worse were it not for underwater bacteria. A researcher at the University of California-Santa Barbara found that microbes consumed almost all the methane released by the spill before it could rise from the sea floor and contribute to global warming. By volume methane was the biggest hydrocarbon released by the disaster last April, and previous comparable releases of methane are believed to have contributed significantly to climate change.