Bacteria Could Help Clean Oiled Gulf Sands

Cleanup workers are scrubbing, washing and even carting away sand from Gulf beaches, but some scientists believe tiny microbes may be the workers' best ally in the long run.

They want to know if they can somehow boost the natural oil-munching bacteria that live in the sand without creating some other ecological problem at the same time.

Biological oceanographer Markus Huettel and his team of researchers spent the past week surveying the sugar-like white sand beaches from Dauphin Island, Ala., to Panama City, Fla.

"It was pretty depressing," said Huettel, a professor at Florida State University, about the oil he saw everywhere. "I know that the microbial community can handle a lot. They will be able to degrade that stuff. The question is how other organisms can handle that long a time period and how our economy can handle it."

Huettel says that bacteria need sunlight, nutrients and oxygen to transform the carbon-based petroleum into food. What worries him is that he found oil several feed below the surface -- an oxygen-poor zone that is too deep for the bacteria to work.

Huettel says chemical dispersants used far at sea made the oil droplets smaller and perhaps less toxic to wildlife. But that also means that the oil is seeping deep into sands, and possibly groundwater supplies used by some beach communities.

"We have to figure out how to accelerate degradation in these beaches," Huettel said.

He believes beach bacteria could work faster with a shot of nitrogen or phosphorous, but that in turn could lead to algal blooms that rob the water of oxygen, killing fish and other marine life.

As Huettel looks for a solution in his lab, workers hired by BP are pushing oil-stained sand into giant sifters and washing machines to separate toxic oil from the sand. In Pensacola, Fla., and Grand Isle, La., some people believe BP is pushing clean sand on top of the oil -- an attempt to cover up the oil spill. That's a theory pushed by several amateur Youtube videos and advocacy websites.

BP officials in Houston denied it. So did Coast Guard officials in New Orleans, and a researcher who is studying the physical properties of oil on the beach.

Ping Wang, a coastal geologist at the University of South Florida, says waves churned up by Hurricane Alex last week pushed new sand onto the beach, which covered up some of the oil.

"We haven't seen it," Wang told Discovery News about the BP cover-up theory. Wang says the Gulf beaches are a constantly-evolving ecosystem of waves and water. He says scientists are struggling just like everyone else to understand the enormity of what is happening .

"It just keeps coming," Wang said about the oil. "Once it stops, maybe it can be cleaned up quickly, but until then we don't have an answer."