Oil Patch Series
A series of wall hangings exploring images and events from the petroleum industry
Oil Patch #5: Sea Snot & More. After the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo Well explosion in 2010, millions of gallons of crude oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists hypothesize that the oil, Mississippi mud, miscellanous ocean stuff and mucus from distressed phytoplankton ("sea snot") coalesced into lumps of insoluble matter that sank to the ocean floor, covering an area as large as Yellowstone National Park. No one has any idea of how to clean it up.