The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico released an estimated 205 million gallons of oil into the water. It remains unclear how much oil was actually recovered, how much remains and where it ended up. Some of the oil has no doubt made its home in fragile coastal ecosystems deep beneath the surface. One way being developed to quickly degrade trapped oil is bioremediation, in which oxygen is injected into the sand through trenches or spraying. Michel Boufadel, chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Temple, is working to implement the technique. He says past cleanup efforts "looked at the beach like a box" and ignored the fact that it is a continually moving organism that needs to be treated according to its particular characteristics.