Study foretold a consequence of oil leak It wasn’t until seven
weeks after the But an unusual experiment conducted in 2000 off
the coast of Norway, a trial run of a deep-water oil and gas
spill that BP helped pay for, showed that oil could remain
underwater for some time. The North Atlantic exercise was
designed to understand how a spill would behave as the drilling
industry plumbed new depths to extract oil and gas. The federal
Minerals Management Service and 22 companies took part in the
test, at about half the depth of the gulf disaster. Oil and gas
were released close to the sea floor and only a fraction of it
was spotted on the surface after about seven hours, defying
conventional wisdom that oil would almost immediately surface
because it’s lighter than water. “Over time, it will rise, but
the rate of rise can be quite slow,’’ said Eric Adams, senior
research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
who helped perform several analyses on Project Deep Spill. “A
lot of the oil [in the experi