Ixtoc: The Gulf's other massive oil spill no longer apparent
McClatchy NewspapersJune 12, 2010     "You look around and it's
like the spill never happened,'' shrugs Tunnell, a marine
biologist. "There's a lot of perplexity in it for many of us.
But if the BP spill seems to be repeating one truth already
demonstrated in the Ixtoc spill ... that human technology is no
match for a high-pressure undersea oil blowout ... scientists
are hoping that it may eventually confirm another: that the
environment has a stunning capacity to heal itself from manmade
insults.  "The environment is amazingly resilient, more so than
most people understand,'' says Luis A. Soto, a deep-sea
biologist with advanced degrees from Florida State University
and the University of Miami who teaches at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico.  "To be honest, considering the
magnitude of the spill, we thought the Ixtoc spill was going to
have catastrophic effects for decades ...But within a couple of
years, almost everything was close