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As containment of the Gulf oil spill progressed, scientists looked at its aftermath amidst the Gulf's other problems. Evaporation is cleaning up the oil more than anything else, but since different compounds evaporate at different speeds, the makeup of the oil is ever-changing, Chris Reddy (2006) said. When flying over the marshes of Louisiana recently, Denise Reed (2006) saw mostly green, which she saw as a sign of the wetlands' resilience. Felicia Coleman (2000) compared the media outcry over the oil spill to the silence on the Gulf's many other persistent problems. The annual low-oxygen "dead zone" caused by overuse of fertilizers reached the size of Massachusetts this year, according to a report by Nancy Rabalais (1999).
