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April 20th, 2010.

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Forty-one miles off the Louisiana coast, the 
Deepwater Horizon drilling rig leased by BP

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suffered a devastating blowout and exploded 
in the Gulf of Mexico.

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It was a very chaotic time

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11 people lost their lives, many others were 
injured.

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It was catastrophic.

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Deepwater was probably the most complex and 
diverse oil spill in the history of oil spills.

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People were very prepared for another Exxon 
Valdez...

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They weren't prepared for this.

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While the Coast Guard searched for survivors 
from the air, response teams worked to contain

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the fire at the surface.

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But in the deep sea, nearly a mile beneath 
the rig, the largest offshore oil spill on

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record was just getting started.

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The first time I saw a video of the discharging 
wellhead it literally took my breath away.

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I realized how truly bad this was and how 
difficult it was going to be to stop the disaster

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that was unfolding.

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Over the next 87 days, BP s Macondo wellhead 
discharged roughly 134 million gallons of

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oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

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The unprecedented spill affected nearly 68,000 
square miles of ocean surface and damaged

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1,300 miles of shoreline across five states.

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Despite months of clean-up efforts, the spill 
became one of the largest environmental catastrophes

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in American history.

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I knew pretty early on that this was going 
to be a marathon, not a sprint.

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It was one of the most intense periods of 
my scientific life.

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As a result of the developing spill, the Gulf 
of Mexico Research Initiative, or GoMRI, was

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created with a $500-million-dollar grant from 
BP for peer-reviewed, independent research

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on the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

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The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative just 
transformed our knowledge of the Gulf of Mexico.

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We started with a clean whiteboard to try 
to understand what we thought would be important

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10 years from that point.

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So what would we have to know to have a better 
response to it?

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There's a lot going on here. Wow.

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What was the extent of Deepwater Horizon s 
damage to ecosystems deep in the Gulf of Mexico?

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And are we prepared for the next big spill?