Ayanna Nahmias, Editor-in-ChiefLast Modified: 13:55 PM EDT, 1 May 2012

LOUISIANA, United States - On the second anniversary of the massive British Petroleum (BP) Gulf of Mexico oil spill, very little if any information has percolated through the American media about the ongoing impact of this disaster.

As a consequence of the Gulf of Mexico disaster, BP now holds the dubious honor of polluting the environment with the world's largest oil spill in history.

By comparison it dwarfs the Alaskan oil spill which occurred in "Prince William Sound, on 24 March 1989, when the Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker bound for Long Beach, California, struck Prince William Sound's Bligh Reef and spilled 260,000 to 750,000 barrels (41,000 to 119,000 m3) of crude oil." (Source: Wikipedia)

According to Pamela A. Miller, the carnage was absolutely devastating and 13 years later, though Prince William Sound may look idyllic to the causal observer, it belies the fundamental environmental problems that remain in the wake of the disaster. Four years ago in a technical background paper she authored for the Alaska Wilderness League, she wrote:

"If you look beneath the surface, oil continues to contaminate beaches, national parks, and designated wilderness. In fact, the Office of Technology Assessment estimated beach cleanup and oil skinning only recovered 3-4% of the Exxon Valdez oil and studies by government scientists estimated that only 14% of the oil was removed during cleanup operations.

(Source: Alaska Oil Spill Commission. 1990. Spill: the wreck of the Exxon Valdez. Executive Summary, p. 11. Spies, R.B., S.D. Rice, D.A. Wolfe, and B.A. Wright. 1996. The effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill on the Alaskan coastal environment. American Fisheries Society Symposium 18: 1-16; at p.4.)

Despite protestations from environmental groups, like Greenpeace and others, the US environmental regulatory agencies and BP have denied any corollary between the deformities which have been identified in Gulf Coast fish and the oil spill or the dispersants used to contain it.

It is ludicrous for BP to assert that they have cleaned up or remediated the effects of "4.9 million barrels (780,000 m3) of crude oil roughly calculated as 53,000 barrels per day (8,400 m3/d)" on the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem, when it took twice that long to clean up just 15% of that amount (750,000 barrels) from the Alaskan Exxon Valdez oil spill.

The video below provides shocking footage of the physical abnormalities which have developed in the fish populations of the region and further information about these finding can be read in an extensive article on Aljazeera, originally published on 20 April 2012.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boM7tFVZ1A0&feature=related]

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