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Nearly a year after the spill began, it seemed that the worst-case scenario would never come true. It's not that the oil spill had no lasting effects, but the ecological doomsday many predicted, clearly hasn't taken place. There is recovery, but it will take effortless attempts to have a stable ecosystem. A lot of questions remain unanswered. As we approach the anniversary of the spill, judgment is becoming the accepted wisdom: it could have been worse. That isn't to minimize what did happen in the Gulf of Mexico. Roughly 4.9 million barrels of oil blew out of BP's broken well and bled into the water, with a portion of that crude making landfall along the coastline. Add in the unknown effect of 1.84 million gallons (7 million Liters) of chemical dispersants, much of which were applied directly to the well deep below the surface of the ocean - something that had never been done before. Even the cleanup might have had an impact on the environment, thanks to the burning of oil on the surface of the Gulf, and the tens of thousands of workers who trampled along the sensitive wetlands of Louisiana, corralling crude wherever they could. Scientists caution that a single year isn't long enough to draw any final conclusions about an environmental insult so huge. Yet the damage does seem so far to have been less than feared. Take the oil itself: scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated last August that much of the oil had remained in the Gulf, where it had dispersed or dissolved. Many environmentalists attacked the report for underplaying the threat of large underwater oil plumes still active in the Gulf, yet later independent scientific studies indeed found that oil had largely disappeared from the water. Turns out we can thank bacteria. Scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; University of California, Santa Barbara; and Texas A&M University traveled to the site of the blown well and found that microbes had digested much of the oil and methane that remained in the water. By autumn, the levels were back to normal. for all the work and the billions poured into the cleanup, nature itself played a very big role. Fortunate ocean currents kept some of the oil from ever reaching shore, while the decision to increase the flow of the Mississippi River provided an additional pushback. As a result, while parts of the southern Louisiana coast were hit hard by the oil - and crude can still be seen in the marshes - much of the Gulf Coast was spared heavy oiling, and the spill never curled around Florida as forecasters feared in the early days. Around 8,000 birds were identified as killed by the spill, though researchers suggest that at least eight times as many likely died but were never found. Even so, that would be far less than the 250,000 birds estimated killed in the aftermath of the spill, even though that spill was far smaller. Local conditions mattered - the spill occurred in the relatively compact Prince William Sound, maximizing the impact on birds in the area, while the BP spill spread out over some 1,600 miles (2,580 km) of the Gulf Coast.