ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Persistence and biodegradation of oil at the ocean floor following Deepwater Horizon.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 113 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Moisture-driven redox dynamics shape oil-degrading microbiomes in tropical intertidal sands.Environmental science and ecotechnology · 2026Article
- Metagenomic analysis of water column samples collected from Green Canyon 233 prior to the Deepwater Horizon incident.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Geospatial and Temporal Inventory for Industrial DDT Waste Disposal to a Deep Coastal Ocean Environment.Environmental science & technology · 2025Article
- High hydrostatic pressure stimulates n-CCommunications biology · 2025Article
- Maintaining ocean ecosystem health with hydrocarbonoclastic microbes.ISME communications · 2025Review
- Influence of Extremely High Pressure and Oxygen on Hydrocarbon-Enriched Microbial Communities in Sediments from the Challenger Deep, Mariana Trench.Microorganisms · 2023Article
- Snow-Dependent Biogeochemical Cycling of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons at Coastal Antarctica.Environmental science & technology · 2023Article
- Bacteria, Fungi and Microalgae for the Bioremediation of Marine Sediments Contaminated by Petroleum Hydrocarbons in the Omics Era.Microorganisms · 2021Review
- Gill and liver transcriptomic responses of Achirus lineatus (Neopterygii: Achiridae) exposed to water-accommodated fraction (WAF) of light crude oil reveal an onset of hypoxia-like condition.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2021Article
- Quantitative analysis of PAH compounds in DWH crude oil and their effects on Caenorhabditis elegans germ cell apoptosis, associated with CYP450s upregulation.The Science of the total environment · 2020Article
- Shell-by-Shell Functionalization of Inorganic Nanoparticles.Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2020Review
- Impacts of dibenzopyrenes on bacterial community isolated from Gulf of Mexico sediment.MicrobiologyOpen · 2020Article
- Bacteria forming drag-increasing streamers on a drop implicates complementary fates of rising deep-sea oil droplets.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Mesocosm experiments to better understand hydrocarbon half-lives for oil and oil dispersant mixtures.PloS one · 2020Article
- The southern Gulf of Mexico: A baseline radiocarbon isoscape of surface sediments and isotopic excursions at depth.PloS one · 2020Article
- A new ecology-on-a-chip microfluidic platform to study interactions of microbes with a rising oil droplet.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Reduced TCA cycle rates at high hydrostatic pressure hinder hydrocarbon degradation and obligate oil degraders in natural, deep-sea microbial communities.The ISME journal · 2019Article
- Petroleum hydrocarbon release behavior study in oil-sediment aggregates: turbulence intensity and chemical dispersion effect.RSC advances · 2019Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster introduced an unprecedented discharge of oil into the deep Gulf of Mexico. Considerable uncertainty has persisted regarding the oil's fate and effects in the deep ocean. In this work we assess the compound-specific rates of biodegradation for 125 aliphatic, aromatic, and biomarker petroleum hydrocarbons that settled to the deep ocean floor following release from the damaged Macondo Well. Based on a dataset comprising measurements of up to 168 distinct hydrocarbon analytes in 2,980 sediment samples collected within 4 y of the spill, we develop a Macondo oil "fingerprint" and conservatively identify a subset of 312 surficial samples consistent with contamination by Macondo oil. Three trends emerge from analysis of the biodegradation rates of 125 individual hydrocarbons in these samples. First, molecular structure served to modulate biodegradation in a predictable fashion, with the simplest structures subject to fastest loss, indicating that biodegradation in the deep ocean progresses similarly to other environments. Second, for many alkanes and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons biodegradation occurred in two distinct phases, consistent with rapid loss while oil particles remained suspended followed by slow loss after deposition to the seafloor. Third, the extent of biodegradation for any given sample was influenced by the hydrocarbon content, leading to substantially greater hydrocarbon persistence among the more highly contaminated samples. In addition, under some conditions we find strong evidence for extensive degradation of numerous petroleum biomarkers, notably including the native internal standard 17α(H),21β(H)-hopane, commonly used to calculate the extent of oil weathering.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.