(David Biello) Modern civilization is addicted to oil.

We burn up or otherwise consume some ninety million barrels of the goop

every day: that ends up making a mess.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency,

there are an average of seventy spills everyday, mostly insignificant.

Every once in a while, we make a spectacular mess,

like the punctured Exxon-Valdez oil tanker, off the coast of Alaska,

or BP's blown-out Macondo well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

When humans make a big mess like that, humans try to clean it up.

We corral it with booms or burn it off.

But whatever we miss ends up getting eaten by microscopic bugs.

In fact, bacteria and other microbes are one of the main reasons

that BP's Gulf oil spill wasn't a bigger disaster.

A big bloom of bugs ate most to the 4.1 million barrels of oil spill,

before it could wash into Wetlands or tar sea creatures.

How big was the bloom? 100 sextillion microbial cells big.

Here's how they work.

Oil has been a part of life on Earth for eons

and microbes evolved to take advantage of that.

Tiny bacteria feast on the oil and gas seeping from the bottom of the sea floor,

or bubbling to the surface.

They are not necessarily fast, but they are thorough,

turning loose hydrocarbons into more microbial cells.

But microbes don't only eat oil.

Plastics, often made from oil, get everywhere too:

for example the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

is made up of tiny grains of plastic and the occasional grocery bag.

it's actually proved to be hospitable home for plastick-eating microbes

and other microscopic life.

This new ecosystem has been dubbed the plastisphere.

On their own microbes would probably take eons to clean up our plastic mess,

but with synthetic biology, we could tweak these little friends

and help speed up that process.

We could help them to help us.

Scientists have been working on souping up microbes' ability to eat oil for decades.

The very first genetically modified organism to be patented

was an oil-eating microbe, way back in 1980.

There's no reason the plastic eaters couldn't be enhanced in the same way.

It's obviously better to avoid trashing plastic and dumping oil in the first place,

but since we're a messy bunch it's a good thing we have microbes around

to help us clean up.

For Scientific American's Instant Egg, I'm David Biello.

(music)

[Subscribe! Written & presented by David Biello - Edited by Joss Fong - Produced by Eric R. Olson]

[Other credits and further written info]