Officials have yet to find the source of the oil spill, which has left chunky globules and long slicks near a 67-mile-long pipeline system off the coast of Louisiana.
On Facebook, the Coast Guard said that oil was "skimmed and sampled" roughly four miles southeast of South Pass, Louisiana on Friday, at which point they retrieved about 210 gallons of "oily-water mixture."
Matt Rota, senior policy director for Healthy Gulf, told CBS affiliate WWL-TV that the amount of oil thought to have spilled could still increase.
NOAA is helping oversee the incident, and the agency's emergency operations coordinator Doug Helton told WWL that it's not necessarily the amount of oil, but its impact, that is of most concern.
Just north of the spill and Plaquemines Parish lies the Chandeleur Islands, where last year, the world's most endangered sea turtle species, the Kemp's Ridley, was found hatching for the first time in three-quarters of a century.
"Continued oil and gas development in the Gulf represents a clear, existential threat to the whale's survival and recovery," a group of 100 scientists said in a letter to the Biden administration last year.
"The government's Natural Resource Damage Assessment on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill estimates that nearly 20% of Gulf of Mexico whales were killed, with additional animals suffering reproductive failure and disease."
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