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How often do oil spills occur daily?

Do oil spills occur naturally, or only man-made?

  • It occurs to me there are tens of thousands of oil deposits worldwide. Oil deposits are created naturally. Earthquakes occur naturally. Volcanoes and other natural disasters occur naturally. So it stands to reason that oil deposits can rupture through natural means, and probably have, long before the first humans ever inhabited the planet. Has this occurred to anyone else? And are there any records of a non-human-caused oil spill?

  • Answer:

    There are many, many natural oil seeps all over the world. Of course, none of them are to the scale of the recent BP leak in the gulf. The first oil that was "produced" was in Pennsylvania, Drake sunk a shallow well directly on top of a natural oil seep. Thousands of years ago, the Chinese people were using oil seeping from the ground as weapons and natural medicinal. It is even referred to in the bible as pitch used for building purposes in Babylon In the 1990's, the environmentalists in California forced the state government to harshly regulate the oil drilling off the coast line. This was due to tar balls and oil washing up on the California beaches. Many offshore rigs were plugged and shut down. Months later oil was still washing ashore. Is was not till an ROV was send to look for the source of the oil did they find out the truth. Is was from a natural oil seep miles away from any production. Once this was found out, a company built a dome over the seep and is capturing the oil for production.

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I don't know if you would qualify this as a natural spill, but Le Brea Tar Pits are a form of natural tar that is the surface and is covered by a film of water. They are located in Los Angeles and are created from crude oil that seeps up to the surface creating these pools .

Antonio

It is man-made. Oil spills happen when people make mistakes or are careless and cause an oil tanker to leak oil into the ocean. There are a few more ways an oil spill can occur. Equipment breaking down may cause an oil spill. If the equipment breaks down, the tanker may get stuck on shallow land. When they start to drive the tanker again, they can put a hole in the tanker causing it to leak oil. When countries are at war, one country may decide to dump gallons of oil into the other country’s oceans. Terrorists may cause an oil spill because they will dump oil into a country’s ocean. Many terrorists will do this because they are trying to get the country’s attention, or they are trying to make a point to a country. Illegal dumpers are people that will dump crude oil into the oceans because they do not want to spend money on decomposing their waste oil. Because they won’t spend money on breaking up the oil (decomposing it) they will dump oil into the oceans, which is illegal. Natural disasters (like hurricanes) may cause an oil spill, too. If a hurricane was a couple of miles away, the winds from the hurricane could cause the oil tanker to flip over, pouring oil out.

Tanya

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