“The way in which information about the Gulf of Mexico has been presented is that it is abundant in oil and not in life,” says Renata Terrazas, Executive Director of Oceana in Mexico. Reducing this sea to a deposit and ignoring its biological wealth is not innocent: it protects the interests of oil companies. “That social image has been created that it is a great desert, when it is not. The Gulf of Mexico is measured by oil barrels, what we have done there is terrible.”
Given this situation, Oceana, the largest international organization dedicated to the conservation of oceans, proposes shield the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico of oil exploration and exploitation through a safeguard area. His argument is clear: to go deeper implies greater risks for marine life and for coastal communities. According to a analysis of incidents on oil platforms, cited by the Oceana reportstatistical evidence indicates that by Every 30 meters deep, the probability of an incident increases by 8.5%.
A unique place for life
The initiative of scientists and environmentalists proposes to prohibit extractive activity in 346,000 square kilometers of deep water, which is equivalent to 46% of Mexico’s exclusive economic zone in the region. The bet proposes to rethink what is the richness of this sea.
The Gulf of Mexico is an important climate regulator and so that it works as such, its health must be taken. Is Biodiversity focus. House 15,419 species of vertebrates, invertebrates, bacteria, viruses and algae, of which, 1,511 are endemicthat is, they do not exist anywhere else. It is home to 28 species of cetaceans and four of the eight species of known sea turtles. “In the future we will find millions of species,” adventure Mariana ReynaOceana Science Coordinator, stressing that we barely “know 5% of our seas.”
The Gulf has coral reefs, ecosystems that cover less than 0.1% of the oceans but hold one in four marine species. It also has marine pastures, fundamental for the reproduction of commercial species such as lobster.
“It is a great maritime ecosystem, it is connected by its sea currents that lead from the beaches to the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, which reaches almost 4,500 meters deep,” says Reyna. There the conditions of high pressure and low temperatures create extreme worlds. Near these sites, where sunlight barely penetrates, navigates a gentle giant: the sperm whale (Physeter macrochalus), which can immerse more than 3,000 meters. Its presence indicates the health of deep ecosystems.
An unsustainable threat
“The wells of shallow waters in the Gulf of Mexico are about to extinguish. We believe that we must go for more, to go for more deep waters, even without knowing how much oil we have there. Studies say that there is little and difficult extraction, but voracity leads to deep waters,” warns terraces.
This “voracity” has already had devastating consequences. In 1979, the drilling of the Ixtoc-I, in the Campeche probe, caused a spill of 560 million liters of crude oil for 280 days. In 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon platform released 4.9 million barrels of oil. “And we did not learn,” laments terraces, remembering that although fines were imposed, “the effects remain in the Gulf of Mexico for decades. The reproduction of the dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico has been damaged after the spill of Deepwater Horizon, and they are issues that we are not telling.”
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