By Kerry Sanders, NBC News correspondent

GRAND ISLE, La. – Five miles into the Louisiana marshes, a team of scientists from Tulane University motors along on a flat-bottomed aluminum jon boat.

Here, deep into the marshes and well past the oil-soaking booms where few independent scientists have ventured, the team has made a disheartening discovery: oil.

Dr. Michael Blum, a coastal marsh ecologist, said he had received reports from fishermen that oil had penetrated up to 17 miles into the marshes.

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His team hoped to travel that full distance and would have but for an engine failure on the second jon boat with more scientists. (Jon boats are usually used for shallow water fishing, not searching for oil).

It was only after towing the second boat back to the dock that the team was able to make its way past the barrier islands into the marshlands.

Blum noted that oil in the Gulf is not unusual. “Oil leaks naturally in the Gulf every year. Tens of thousands of gallons and the marshes can handle that.”

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And studies done at Nicholls State University reveal the marshes can survive small oil spills.

“I want to give people hope that the marshes can recover,” said Dr. Kerry St. Pé, a professor who has conducted those studies.

But both St. Pé and Blum noted this situation is different. “We’re talking about millions of gallons of oil,” Blum said.

While exploring the marshes, Tom Shannon, another ecologist with Tulane, found marine hermit crabs coated in oil, climbing the marsh reeds. “This is insane,” he said.

Marine hermit crabs are supposed to live in the water, which is why it was unusual to see them climbing the grasses. “It looks to me like they’re trying to breath,” said Shannon.

BP has deployed hundreds of miles of booms to trap the oil before it gets to the marshes. But as the Tulane scientists witnessed, often those booms have failed.

Their anchors are not holding – which allows even a gentle breeze to push the booms now soaked in oil into the marshes they’re supposed to protect. This is a problem,” said Blum. “These need attention now.”

Blum was unwilling to go so far as to say those who are placing the booms have little experience in this work, but several shrimpers doing the work here admit they’re learning as they go along.

Is it time to give up on the booms?

“Not at all,” said Blum. “This can work, it just needs to be done correctly and monitored.”

BP’s Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said the oil company is committed to saving the marshes.

“If it’s done in the right way, the marsh will come back, and there’s evidence for that,” he said.