Amidst the thick mangroves, under the turquoise tranquil waters and along the shoreline of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, the world's worst peacetime oil spill once hit here and more than 30 years later, there are still a few signs of Ixtoc.

The massive spill in June of 1979 bares striking similarity to the BP Horizon Spill still gushing into the Gulf as a blowout preventer malfunctioned failing to stop the flow of oil that would eventually dump nearly 3 and a half million barrels into the Bay of Campeche. The oil wouldn't just blanket the coastline here in Mexico, but eventually it would cover more than 160 miles of Texas beaches.

"It was a fairly similar to the one today as we understand. It too was a blowout preventor that malfunctioned 50 miles north of the Mexican coast in the city of Ciudad Carmen in about 170 ft of water. Ixtoc blew from the 3rd of June 1979, to the 23rd of March 1980, almost 10 months. It was 140 million gallons in total the largest peacetime spill that has ever been recorded in history," says Dr. Wes Tunnell a marine biologist at Texas A&M Corpus Christi.

Dr. Tunnell was a new professor on the Texas coast at the time and has studied the aftermath over the coarse of the last 30 years. "I feel that learning from the past that we know the sandy beaches will recover from 2 to 3 years, or maybe a little longer.  The ones that I’m worried about are the salt marshes of the Mississippi Delta, particularly the eastern side, where the oil is starting to come in now. Those salt marshes are a ten on a scale on a 1 to 10, they will be the most damaged and the toughest to clean up."