By Sandra C. Roa, University Communications and Marketing
After nearly ten years of research, hundreds of international scientists are revealing their findings on the effects of the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill. They’re attending the final Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and Ecosystem (GoMOSES) conference hosted by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI), an independent research program established following the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill, the largest in U.S. history. University of South Florida received one of the largest portions of the grant, totaling $36 million to establish the Center for Integrated Modeling and Analysis of Gulf Ecosystems (C-IMAGE), an international consortium of professors, post-doctoral scholars and students from 19 collaborating institutions.
As the Deepwater Horizon disaster was unfolding, ±«Óătv’s College of Marine Science (CMS) organized an “all-hands-on-deck” approach to assessing the impacts of and, later, the factors that contributed to the disaster. The goals of this research were to (1) inform the public and regulators of the short-, medium-, and long-term consequences of the disaster to the environment and people, and (2) to better understand the chain of events that l