After BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, Paul Montagna was given the job of rushing into the blackened seas to find out how much harm the nation’s biggest oil disaster was doing to the creatures on the sea bottom — the tiny, barely understood and rarely seen organisms that quite literally form the foundation of the Gulf’s ecosystem.
Aboard an old, overcrowded research ship, Montagna and a group of other scientists dodged oil slicks, Coast Guard patrol boats and cleanup vessels to grab as many deep-sea core samples as they could before BP, which was paying for the research, told him to wrap up. The company was eager to begin negotiating a settlement with the federal government over ballooning claims of widespread environmental damage.
