Name: Can Microbes Clean Up Our Oily Mess? - Instant Egghead #58
Uploaded: 2021-05-16T02:42:36.000Z
Duration: 2 min 41 s
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(David Biello) Modern civilization is addicted to oil.

We burn up or otherwise consume some ninety million barrels of the goop

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency,

there are an average of seventy spills everyday, mostly insignificant.

Every once in a while, we make a spectacular mess,

like the punctured Exxon-Valdez oil tanker, off the coast of Alaska,

or BP's blown-out Macondo well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

When humans make a big mess like that, humans try to clean it up.

But whatever we miss ends up getting eaten by microscopic bugs.

In fact, bacteria and other microbes are one of the main reasons

that BP's Gulf oil spill wasn't a bigger disaster.

A big bloom of bugs ate most to the 4.1 million barrels of oil spill,

before it could wash into Wetlands or tar sea creatures.

How big was the bloom? 100 sextillion microbial cells big.

Oil has been a part of life on Earth for eons

and microbes evolved to take advantage of that.

Tiny bacteria feast on the oil and gas seeping from the bottom of the sea floor,

They are not necessarily fast, but they are thorough,

turning loose hydrocarbons into more microbial cells.

Plastics, often made from oil, get everywhere too:

for example the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

is made up of tiny grains of plastic and the occasional grocery bag.

it's actually proved to be hospitable home for plastick-eating microbes

This new ecosystem has been dubbed the plastisphere.

On their own microbes would probably take eons to clean up our plastic mess,

but with synthetic biology, we could tweak these little friends

Scientists have been working on souping up microbes' ability to eat oil for decades.

The very first genetically modified organism to be patented

was an oil-eating microbe, way back in 1980.

There's no reason the plastic eaters couldn't be enhanced in the same way.

It's obviously better to avoid trashing plastic and dumping oil in the first place,

but since we're a messy bunch it's a good thing we have microbes around

For Scientific American's Instant Egg, I'm David Biello.

[Subscribe! Written & presented by David Biello - Edited by Joss Fong - Produced by Eric R. Olson]

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Can Microbes Clean Up Our Oily Mess? - Instant Egghead #58

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