--- title: Yet More BP Oil Found at Bottom of Gulf description: 200 million gallons of oil were spilled after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig canonical: https://time.com/3695425/more-bp-oil-found-gulf-of-mexico/ author: Andy Tully/Oilprice.com article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-02-04T16:01:59.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-22T04:08:46.898Z article:section: Science og:title: Yet More BP Oil Found at Bottom of Gulf og:description: 200 million gallons of oil were spilled after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig og:url: https://time.com/3695425/more-bp-oil-found-gulf-of-mexico/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta5b79d1da0d9bf25/69877d8fe20a87a032a84ec0/grand-isle-louisiana.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3000 og:image:height: 1688 og:image:alt: Birds fly over a man fishing on April 19, 2014 in Grand Isle, Louisiana, days after a BP announcement that it is ending its "active cleanup" on the Louisiana coast from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Yet More BP Oil Found at Bottom of Gulf twitter:description: 200 million gallons of oil were spilled after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta5b79d1da0d9bf25/69877d8fe20a87a032a84ec0/grand-isle-louisiana.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Yet More BP Oil Found at Bottom of Gulf > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=1b3086fb-c4c1-449b-8575-d3cf27487a8c&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) by [Andy Tully/Oilprice.com](https://time.com/author/andy-tullyoilprice-com/) ## Andy Tully/Oilprice.com Feb 4, 2015 4:01 PM UTC  Birds fly over a man fishing on April 19, 2014 in Grand Isle, Louisiana, days after a BP announcement that it is ending its "active cleanup" on the Louisiana coast from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Birds fly over a man fishing on April 19, 2014 in Grand Isle, Louisiana, days after a BP announcement that it is ending its "active cleanup" on the Louisiana coast from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Sean Gardner—Getty Images by [Andy Tully/Oilprice.com](https://time.com/author/andy-tullyoilprice-com/) ## Andy Tully/Oilprice.com Feb 4, 2015 4:01 PM UTC Scientists already have reported finding what they called a 1,235-square-mile “bathtub ring” of oil on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico left over from the huge 2010 BP oil spill. Now it appears this ring is part of a washroom set: A different team of scientists has found that up 10 million gallons of oil have created what can only be called a “bath mat” beneath the sediment of the gulf’s floor. First the ring. David Valentine and colleagues from the University of California at Santa Barbara wrote in the [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/45/15906) in October 2014 that about 10 million gallons of the spilled oil settled on the gulf’s floor. Its size: about the size of the state of Rhode Island. But what about the rest? As much as 200 million gallons of oil were spilled after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, owned by BP and Anadarko Petroleum Corp., [exploded off the coast of New Orleans](http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Gulf-Ecosystem-Still-Feeling-Effects-of-Deepwater-Horizon-Spill.html), killing 11 workers on the rig and injuring 17 more, and allowing oil to gush into the gulf for nearly three months. **Read more:** [Oil Majors’ Profits Take A Beating](http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Oil-Majors-Profits-Take-A-Beating.html) All that oil has been hard to find. But a team of scientists led by Jeff Chanton found between 6 million and 10 million gallons buried in the sediment at the bottom of the gulf about 60 miles southeast of the Mississippi Delta. Chanton is a professor of oceanography at Florida State University (FSU). Chanton and his colleagues, writing in the journal [Environmental Science & Technology](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es5046524?journalCode=esthag), says they determined how oil caused particles in the gulf to accrete, or clump together, then sink all the way to the floor of a body of water. Their secret weapon, they wrote, was carbon 14, a radioactive isotope often used to date ancient artifacts. In this case, though, the FSU team used carbon 14 as an “inverse tracer” to find the oil. It works this way: Oil doesn’t contain carbon 14, so any sediment that did contain the isotope would become evident in their search. What didn’t show carbon 14 was oil. Then Chanton worked with Tingting Zhao, an associate professor of geography at FSU, to create a map of the areas without carbon 14 on the floor of the gulf. From that information he was able to estimate the amount of oil that made up this “bath mat.” **Read more:** [Low Prices Lead To Layoffs In The Oil Patch](http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Low-Prices-Lead-To-Layoffs-In-The-Oil-Patch.html) The “bathtub ring” and “bath mat” metaphors may be lighthearted, and at first, Chanton said, he wondered whether the accretion of the oil and its sinking to the floor of the gulf might be benign, if not necessarily beneficial, to the aquatic ecosystem. After all, [he told FSU’s news department](http://news.fsu.edu/More-FSU-News/Where-did-the-missing-oil-go-New-study-says-some-is-sitting-on-the-Gulf-floor), the water was clarified and the oil had separated from the water. But in the long term, he said, it’s a problem because the “mat” of oil removes oxygen from the materials that make up the floor. That, in turn, makes it harder for bacteria to attack the oil and make it decompose. “This is going to affect the gulf for years to come,” Chanton said. “Fish will likely ingest contaminants because worms ingest the sediment, and fish eat the worms. It’s a conduit for contamination into the food web.” _This_ [_article_](http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Yet-More-BP-Oil-Found-At-Bottom-Of-Gulf.html) _originally appeared on_ [_Oilprice.com_](http://www.oilprice.com/)_._ _More from Oilprice.com:_ * [Judge Sets BP’s Maximum Fine 24 Percent Lower Than US Demand](http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Judge-Sets-BPs-Maximum-Fine-24-Percent-Lower-Than-US-Demand.html) * [BP, Another Victim Of Cheap Oil, To Cut Jobs Through 2015](http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/BP-Another-Victim-Of-Cheap-Oil-To-Cut-Jobs-Through-2015.html) * [Good News For BP In Oil Spill Case](http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Good-News-For-BP-In-Oil-Spill-Case.html) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3695425/more-bp-oil-found-gulf-of-mexico/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3695425/more-bp-oil-found-gulf-of-mexico/"},"headline":"Yet More BP Oil Found at Bottom of Gulf","datePublished":"2015-02-04T16:01:59.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-22T04:08:46.898Z","description":"200 million gallons of oil were spilled after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig","url":"https://time.com/3695425/more-bp-oil-found-gulf-of-mexico/","keywords":["energy"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta5b79d1da0d9bf25/69877d8fe20a87a032a84ec0/grand-isle-louisiana.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Andy Tully/Oilprice.com","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/andy-tullyoilprice-com/"}],"articleSection":"Science","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta5b79d1da0d9bf25/69877d8fe20a87a032a84ec0/grand-isle-louisiana.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Birds fly over a man fishing on April 19, 2014 in Grand Isle, Louisiana, days after a BP announcement that it is ending its \"active cleanup\" on the Louisiana coast from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.","caption":"Birds fly over a man fishing on April 19, 2014 in Grand Isle, Louisiana, days after a BP announcement that it is ending its \"active cleanup\" on the Louisiana coast from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.","creditText":"Sean Gardner—Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/science/","name":"Science"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/energy/","name":"energy"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3695425/more-bp-oil-found-gulf-of-mexico/","name":"Yet More BP Oil Found at Bottom of Gulf"}}]}] ```