SCOTLAND must know how to tackle a deep water oil spill in the North Atlantic – because the results could be worse than BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster, researchers claim.

Eleven people were killed by the explosion, which spilled 3.19 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in what then-President Barack Obama called "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced".

Dr Tony Gutierrez, associate professor of microbiology at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, was in the US at the time and has researched the impact of the incident, which polluted the coastline and saw BP fined $20 billion dollars.

Now he says a deep water spill in the northeast Atlantic would be harder to contain that the US disaster and the standard means of clearing the slick – chemical dispersants – would create a subsea "dirty blizzard" of marine oil snow (MOS).

The claims are based on work centred in the Faroe-Shetland Channel, where rigs bring oil up from depths of 500m, with the industry eyeing the stretch for reserves at even deeper levels.

Gutierrez said: "There is a pressing need for fundamental research in this region.

"The Faroe-Shetland Channel is the ‘spaghetti junction’ of Icelandic, Norwegian and Atlantic currents and is much more hydrodynamic than the Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon spill occurred.

“The possibility of a deep sea spill in this area in the future cannot be discounted, so it’s vital we know how to respond.

“Our research is a first step to understanding the fate of oil in the event of a major spill in the Faroe Shetland Channel.

“We don’t know exactly what happens when the MOS arrives on the seabed, but given the fragility of sponge belts in the Faroe-Shetland Channel and other sensitive benthic communities, it’s not likely to be good.”

Home to crustaceans and other animal life, the benthic zone is the lowest reach of a body of water and includes both the sediment surface and some layers just below this.

Made up of sticky organic particles containing oil droplets, MOS sinks quickly, leading surface observers to think spills have been cleaned up, but carries the oil to the seabed, potentially harming delicate ecosystems.

The rapid sinking of copious quantities of MOS to the seabed may have accounted for vast quantities of oil that impacted much of the continental slope in the northern Gulf of Mexico around the Macondo wellhead.

The Heriot-Watt team took surface seawater samples from close to the Schiehallion oil field and incubated them with oil under conditions simulating the sea surface for six weeks.

The results, published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Microbiology, show the formation of MOS in samples treated with dispersant.

Gutierrez says more work is needed to understand existing dispersants and develop safer and more effective products to combat oil spills and minimise impacts to marine life.