Comment by chaboud
12 hours ago
When I was a kid growing up in Texas, our ocean visits were to the Gulf of Mexico, off the Texas coast, and you would grab little alcohol wipes for when you got out of the ocean, to wipe the oil off.
Years later, swimming in Hawaii, I found myself looking for wipes. I mentioned it to a snorkel-outfit operator, and she looked at me like I was insane. They didn't even put damaging sunscreen in the water, and there was no expectation of little 1-2 inch sticky spots of oil.
The good old days, in the 80's, where we swam in oceans filled with slow-motion natural disasters. I wonder how much of it was place (Hawaiians seem to have a stronger relationship with the land and nature surrounding them) and how much of it was the time (20 years later).
Crude oil floating in the ocean used to be a big nuisance in parts of California. It is a natural phenomenon, created by oil deposits on the ocean floor leaking into the environment. Santa Barbara was particularly famous for it.
Extraction of that oil via commercial wells greatly reduced the natural seepage, which is why there is so little crude oil floating in that ocean water today. Oil drilling actually made the water cleaner.
So you’re saying drilling destroyed crude oil’s natural habitat?
To me this "drilling is good for the environment narrative" sounded a bit misleading.
And not far down the rabbit whole one finds: The author of the study often cited by oil companies for above narrative, felt impelled to publish a clarifying statement: https://luyendyk.faculty.geol.ucsb.edu/Seeps%20pubs/Luyendyk...
Maybe stricter guidelines against operational "routine" spills led to a reduction of the sticky spots, plausible?
Per NOAA and USGS, ~20 million liters of crude oil naturally seeps into that part of the California ocean each year. That is more crude oil each year than the worst oil spill in California history[0].
You are projecting your biases. There was no "drilling is good for the environment" narrative. I was recounting an interesting fact about the environment there.
Many of these seeps are under considerable pressure as there is substantial natural gas mixed in. The seepage rate of each has been mapped and studied for many decades. It has long been observed that the introduction of drilling appears to substantially reduced the seepage rate at many of these underwater sites. Drilling wells significantly reduces natural pressure in these reservoirs, likely leading to the observed reductions in seepage.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa_Barbara_oil_spill
Wtf I love Exxon now.
I remember swimming in Santa Barbara growing up (well closer to the Ventura side really) and having to dodge oil on the sand and water.
How did the wildlife adapt to that? There must be some cool species there
I don't know much about it but I have read that the local ecosystem is well-adapted to the oil seep environment.
That area has been like that for something like 100,000 years, which is a considerable amount of time in evolutionary terms.
There is still tons of tar on beaches in Santa Barbara county, mostly all from natural seeps.
Natural seepage is still just as big of an issue now as it was back then in those areas, including Santa Barbara.
To this day if you walk on the beach your soles or the soles of your shoes will get sticky tar spots. You need baby oil wipes to clean them up before entering your home.
And some of it, if not most of it is not natural seepage but early environmental catastrophes in the 50s and 60s, particularly around Summerland.
(Source ex-resident)
For what it's worth you still need the alcohol wipes (mineral oil works well too) when swimming off the coast of Santa Barbara. It's naturally occurring oil that gets all over your feet in little annoying sticky spots.
yeah same for the Gulf Coast, oil just seeps right out of the ground at some beaches or at some times. There's plenty of man-made pollution to go around though.
Growing up on the Atlantic coast of Florida, we kept a can or Renuzit solvent in the garage to wipe tar spots off our feet after coming home from the beach. I'm sure that stuff was toxic. The tar was everywhere for a few weeks, then gone for a while.
Hawaii has other problems. When I lived there, I went through a lot of Neosporin because every scrape you get from a reef pushes in bacteria that got into the ocean from the leaking sewer pipes.
Ha, yeah I remember the Galveston beaches as a kid. Left when I was 9, I can't imagine things have improved much since then...
Half-ish (don't get hung up on being exact, they are at least of similar orders of magnitude) of the oil that makes its way into the ocean is natural. That is, leaking out of the ground into the water not at all as a result of human activity. Obviously enormous anthropogenic oil spills make this a very spiky statistic one way or the other.
Oil production and natural oil seepage happen in the gulf of mexico because there's oil there, there's not much oil around Hawaii.
So there's likely both a human and non-human reason for this in Texas.