Off shore oil drilling

When will the world's oceans be clean again? Surely, not until off shore drilling is stopped. The state of our oceans is in trouble, from the smallest organism to the majestic whale, every living thing in the ocean is being affected by off shore drilling. From our government relaxing its policies on ocean drilling, to the technology used by oil companies to find the oil. Every person in the United States was taught from preschool that these planets oceans are very fragile. Ocean's need to be cared for and protected. The ocean is our biggest resource on the planet. Why most people letting Big Oil companies and the United States Government are destroy this precious ecosystem?

According to The mariner group (2005) the very first oil spill was on March 18, 1967, the oil tanker was named the Torrey Canyon, it ran aground off the coast of Cornwall in the United Kingdom. The Torrey Canyon spilled 919,000 barrels of crude oil into the ocean (para. 1). The Largest oil spill in U.S. history was on March 24, 1989 the ship was called the Exxon Valdez, that disaster spilled 240,000 barrels of crude oil in Prince Williams Sound in Alaska; it killed hundreds of sea otter and birds (para. 10). Fifteen years later the ecosystem of Prince Williams Sound is still recovering from the damaging affects of the spill. There are hundreds of oil spills each year worldwide, which negatively affect ecosystems around the globe, and there have been thousands since the Torrey Canyon in 1967. There are some oil spills that are not big enough to be required to report or keep track of. Below is a graph of the 20 largest oil spills in history, the author added the largest U.S. spill in U.S. history, which is the Exxon Valdez in 1989, to show the magnitude of the other oil spills in comparison.

Oil rigs that operate in the ocean have a big problem. They leak crude oil into the ocean via the piping system. It is called “natural seepage”, the author does not accept that term. People should not accept “natural seepage” when it is part of the equation that is destroying our oceans. There should be no seepage from oil or gas lines in the ocean. Even though “natural seepage” doesn't account for much of the total oil polluting the ocean per year, it is still too much. Oil rigs are also responsible for contaminates being released into the ocean. “Contaminates like arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, barite, chrome lignosulfate, petroleum hydrocarbons, vanadium, copper, aluminum, chromium, zinc, polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, radionuclides, and other heavy metals, which can spread at the minimum of a thousand meters from the rigs” (Donatoni, M., 1999). These contaminates are released into the ocean daily by off-shore rigs when oil or gas is being loaded into transport ships (tankers) or during the process of drilling. Think of all the marine life that is affected by these contaminates.

Between tanker disasters and off-shore rigs it's ...