I, for one, hope that this is true, and will be further substantiated:
Study: Petroleum-eating microbes significantly reduced gulf oil plume
David Brown, Washington Post Staff Writer -- Tue, August 24, 2010
Petroleum-eating bacteria - which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the seafloor - proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.
The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing that reduced the amount of oil amounts in the undersea "plume" by half about every three days, according to research published online Tuesday by the journal Science.
The findings, by a team of scientists led by Terry C. Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California [...]
continued at Daily Kos....
