Thirty-one years ago a Pemex oil well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil spewed from the well for 90 days. The disaster was the end of things as we know them. Two years later, the land and the ocean were fine.
Earth repairs things, all on its own.
"The bacteria as well as other marine life forms along the shoreline got a boost from a strategy employed by both the United States and Mexico: to more or less give up on stopping the oil spill from reaching beaches while concentrating on keeping it out of estuaries and wetlands.
"Texas just made a superhuman effort to keep the oil away from rivers, with two or three or four layers of booms to skim it away," said Thomas C. Shirley, a biodiversity specialist at Texas A&M Corpus Christi. "We know how to clean up beaches, and it's simple. It's just sand.
"But you get up into wetlands, where you're cleaning up shrubs and sea grasses, and it's far more difficult. Everything you're cleaning is alive, and you have to be careful not to do more harm than good."
Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/06/13/530250/after-big-1979-spill-a-stunning.html#ixzz0sfBenKE0
(Somebody somewhere must have decided the article is too positive, given the last three paragraphs.)
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