3 Surprising Sources of Oil Pollution in the Ocean
The Texas spill is obvious, but automobile oil is a bigger contributor.
Obvious oil spills, like the 168,000 gallons (635,000 liters) of oil that leaked into Galveston Bay on Saturday, usually make national news, accompanied by pictures of oil-blackened wildlife.
In fact, of the tens of millions of gallons of oil that enter North American oceans each year due to human activities, only 8 percent comes from tanker or oil pipeline spills, according to the 2003 book Oil in the Sea III by the U.S. National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, which is still considered the authority on oil-spill data.
Most oil pollution is "different than the pictures you see of beaches covered with tar and ducks getting stuck in it," said David Valentine, a biogeochemist
