Mother Nature Cleans up Gulf Oil Spill

Turns out, Mother Nature knows how to clean up.

When the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, she was already busy shooting out microbial methane munchers that joined in an underwater concert to help degrade the spill.

Microbes—tiny, one-celled creatures mostly invisible to the naked eye, but present in plants, animals, and even Lady Gaga (more on that in a moment) —were the subject of a free panel discussion led by KTVU Health and Science Editor John Fowler on Monday at .

Joining him were three experts from Walnut Creek’s Joint Genome Institute, Jonathan Eisen, Rachel Mackelprang and Terry Hazen.

The panel, each trailing an extensive list of credentials, degrees, awards and published research, kept the audience spellbound as they described a part of what makes science fascinating: the meek becoming mighty.

Eisen, diving into his presentation, set out to explain what microbes are, why they are so hard to study and how Lady Gaga—an extreme example chosen to represent the human species in opening remarks—was relevant to the matter.

“Without microscopes, we’d be lost,” Eisen said, as a vast array of shapes appeared on the overhead screen behind him.

Microbes of all kinds, from amorphous blobs to forms resembling Christmas tree ornaments, coral shells, bee hives and even jewelry, showed their diversity.

A list of functions described the powerful roles the tiny organisms play: bad, nasty microbes associated with bubonic plague; good ones that help legumes grow in nitrogen poor soil; and unusual microbes that thrive in ecosystems Eisner called “weird,” such as boiling acid pools and low-temperature environments.

“Microbes can do any kind of chemistry you can think of,” he boasted.

What has proved difficult has been studying microbes. Field studies are challenging for reasons related to microbial size and diversity. And growing them in labs has not been successful.

By bringing collected samples to the lab and sequencing their DNA in much the same way human genes have been sequenced, Eisen said scientists are beginning to gain insights. This is where Lady Gaga came into the discussion, with the presenters displaying a photo of the entertainer as an example of a human being with DNA—as well as a unique fashion sense.

Much of Mackelprang’s research has been devoted to permafrost microbes.

The permafrost is perennially frozen ground and represents about 20 percent of the land in the Northern Hemisphere. Most of the world’s permafrost has been frozen for millennia.

“Greenhouse gases trap the heat from the sun,” Mackelprang said, “which is good, except that we’re putting too much [gas] into the air.”

Again, pictures told the story, with “drunken forests” filled with helter-skelter trees and satellite photos showing the polar ice sheet shrinking drastically from 1979 to 2007, like a man rapidly losing his once full, silvery hair.

Global warming is melting the permafrost, Mackelprang warned, and as a result, more carbon is being released at a rate she said is alarming.

Sequencing microbes in the lab is like tearing up a copy of the New York Times then trying to reconstruct the paper, piece by piece, Mackelprang said.

Despite the dire predictions, she steered the discussion away from political arguments about global warming, emphasizing the need to study microbes’ process of degrading carbon and JGI’s plan to develop strategies to restore our planet’s carbon-neutral energy future.

Hazen, the unofficial guru of oil disasters, said the Deepwater spill was actually a “leak” and surpassed even the Exxon Valdez and the less-popular-with-the-media but more comparable IXTOC 1 blow-out of 1979. IXTOC 1 was an exploratory oil well being drilled in the Bay of Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico. 

“We had to use multiple lines of evidence to prove there were organisms under (the surface) to degrade the oil,” he said.

Mother Nature, it turns out, has been seeping natural oil into the ocean since time began, so Hazen said he wasn’t surprised to see organisms that can degrade it.

“Sometimes, the best thing to do is nothing at all, because nature does take care of itself,” he said, explaining that microbes took only 1.2 days to get the methane oil components to half-life after the 2010 gulf event.

Below are highlights of audience questions. Even after the program was over, many people in the nearly-full Margaret Lesher theater stayed behind to extend the discussion with the experts:

Can we move microbes to areas where there are spills?

Mackelprang said no, it’s too expensive and the microbes die or do not have the same effect as naturally occurring organisms.

There’s a large dead zone at the head of the Mississippi now. Can you tell us about it?

Hazen said that actually, there was no oil effect there—no depletion of oxygen.

Can we poke a hole in the atmosphere and let gas out?

Everyone chimed in, including Fowler, who explained that the problem of global warming would not be solved because a hole would let UV out, but not infrared heat.

What should we do with all this information?

“Use it in climate models to predict global warming patterns,” Mackelprang answered.

Microbes’ appetite for carbon and methane—the latter a surprising discovery when bacteria began consuming the methane released by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill last summer—makes understanding its role a crucial part of responding to climate change.