File photo provided by the University of Georgia shows a dead crab with oil residue near it on a still-damaged sea floor about 10 miles north of the BP oil rig accident. (AP)WASHINGTON: Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor. That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012. At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't. “There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading,” Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil. “Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don't know,” Joye said, later adding: “there's a lot of it out there.” The head of the agency in charge of the health of the Gulf said Saturday that she thought that “most of the oil is gone.” And a scientists at the US Department of Energy, doing research with a grant from BP from before the spill, said his examination of oil plumes in the water column show that microbes have done a “fairly fast” job of eating the oil. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientist Terry Hazen said his research differs from Joye's because they looked at different places at different times. Joye's research was more widespread, but has been slower in being published in scientific literature. In five different expeditions, the last one in December, Joye and colleagues took 250 cores of the sea floor and travelled across 2,600 square miles (6,734 sq. kilometers). Some of the locations she had been studying before the oil spill on April 20 and said there was a noticeable change.
