Oil Drilling Contaminated Western Amazon Rainforest, Study Confirms

http://www.livescience.com/46319-oil-drilling-contaminated-amazon.html

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Researchers have confirmed that decades of oil and gas drilling have widely contaminated the Western Amazon rainforest in Peru. Here, valves for an oil well in the Amazon.


SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Peru's Amazon rainforest is extensively contaminated from decades of oil and gas drilling, researchers reported yesterday (June 12) here at the annual Goldschmidt geochemistry conference.

In the past decade, volatile demonstrations by indigenous groups and tangled lawsuits against oil companies have exposed the toxic legacy of decades of oil drilling in the Western Amazon. People living in the rainforest say they are suffering health effects from the nearby polluted drilling and waste sites, and from eating plants and wildlife laced with heavy metals and petroleum compounds.

But lax government regulations during the early years of oil exploration, combined with a lack of environmental monitoring, mean there's little data on the true extent of contamination in the richly diverse rainforest.

"I was surprised by how little has been published," said study co-author Antoni Rosell-Melé, an environmental chemist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain.