The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) accident spilled over 785 million liters of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). A substantial fraction of the spilled oil impacted the northern GOM shoreline, including Alabama beaches. The beached oil was in the form of brownish-orange, water-in-oil emulsion, commonly known as mousse. Although significant remediation efforts were undertaken to clean the contaminated beaches, oil residues in the form of tarballs continue to contaminate various GOM beaches. This study reviews recent literature related to the DWH tarball contamination problem and its impacts on GOM beaches, primarily focusing on the beaches located in Alabama. Though the DWH oil spill is an unfortunate disaster, for researchers it constitutes a large-scale experiment conducted on a natural system. This anthropogenic experiment has taught scientists numerous useful lessons and has also posed several challenging questions, some of which are discussed in this review.

深水地平线 (DWH) 事故将超过 7.85 亿升原油泄漏到墨西哥湾 (GOM)。大部分泄漏的石油影响了戈姆北部海岸线，包括阿拉巴马州的海滩。搁浅的油呈棕橙色油包水乳液形式，通常称为摩丝。尽管为清理受污染的海滩进行了重大的修复工作，但以 tarball 形式存在的石油残留物继续污染 GOM 的各个海滩。本研究回顾了有关 DWH tarball 污染问题及其对 GOM 海滩的影响的最新文献，主要关注位于阿拉巴马州的海滩。尽管 DWH 漏油是一场不幸的灾难，但对于研究人员来说，它构成了在自然系统上进行的大规模实验。