The 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill remains the largest catastrophic release of oil and gas into the deep sea. The irrupted oil and gas substantially impact a marine ecosystem, cause human injury, and have high societal opinions. Therefore, understanding the transport and dispersion of subsurface hydrocarbon provides an imperative substratum for the practical assessment and response of marine oil spill accidents. In this review, we summarize the major advances since the Deepwater Horizon accident, with emphasis on the observation and modeling of the droplet and the formation and dynamics of the plume. Additional complexity including more than the investigation of gas-saturated oil at high-pressure and the effect of Earth's rotation on near field plume is also outlined. We end with a few outlooks on key priorities for more precisely estimations on future oil spills.
Keywords: Deepwater Horizon spill; Droplet size; Integral models; Large-eddy simulation; Scales experiments; Submarine release.
© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.