KESKUSTELU

On NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, White House climate and energy czar Carol M. Browner defended the administration's finding that three-quarters of the 4.9 million barrels (205.8 million gallons) of oil has either disappeared or is in the process of disappearing.

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Hazen's team found that microbes inside the plume samples were packed more than twice as densely as microbes outside it. Even more encouraging, the genes specifically geared to degrade hydrocarbons were more common in the plume as well, implying that it's not just general bacteria that are taking on the plume. All in all, Hazen's group predicts that, with the help of hungry microbes, the concentrations of the hydrocarbons his team analyzed in the plume could drop by half within a week.

But that doesn't mean the oil will be half gone in a week. The good news, according to Ronald Atlas, an oil microbiologist at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, is that the oil is definitely breaking up. "Microbes are clearly degrading the oil. The Hazen paper establishes that," says Atlas, who was not involved in the study. "The question to resolve between the two studies is, what are the real rates of degradation?"

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Mearns sees reason for optimism. He says with Hazen's data and the rest of the data streaming in from elsewhere, scientists are now starting to think the oil will be gone much sooner than people thought before. "We're talking days to months."