During the 2010 Deepwater Horizon crisis, some of the oil gushing from the seafloor appeared as slicks on the sea surface, while roughly half of it, scientists estimate, remained trapped in deep ocean plume of mixed oil and gas more than a mile wide, hundreds of feet high and extending for miles southwest of the broken riser pipe at the damaged Macondo well. “In 2010, we only considered that material flowing from the well and heading southwest was dissolved in a plume. What this study reveals is that some droplets of oil also trended southwest leaving an imprint of oil for about 25 miles, and getting less and less concentrated as it moved farther from the well,” said co-author Chris Reddy, a marine chemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Illustration by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Click image to enlarge)