Texas A&M researcher Wes Tunnell studied the original 1979 Ixtoc blowout off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
He returned to the scene of this year and found “asphalt and tar blocks from the Ixtoc spill wedged into coral in the same places they had been 20 years ago,” the Christian Science Monitor reports.
After breaking open the tar blocks, researchers “got fresh whiffs of petroleum hydrocarbons.”
Thomas Shirley, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi said, “It’s tough stuff, that’s why we put it on roads.”
