Scientists Suspect Giant Plume Of Oil Is Underwater.. Government Can't Find It

For more than three weeks now, crude oil has been erupting out of a pipe a mile underneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. A new analysis of seafloor video indicates that nearly 70,000 barrels could be gushing out every day, NPR reports. That figure is at least 10 times the U.S. Coast Guard's original estimate of the flow, and "the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez tanker every four days."

And nobody really knows where it is, or where it's headed.

Federal officials are carefully tracking the trajectory of the oil that's made it to the water's surface and, increasingly, on shore. They even put out a http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doctype/2931/53979/">daily map.

But there's never been an oil spill this big and this deep before. Nor have authorities ever used chemical dispersants so widely.

As a result, some scientists suspect that a lot, if not most, of the oil is lurking below the surface rather than on it, in a gigantic underwater plume the size and trajectory of which remain largely a mystery.

Oil on the surface can be fairly easily spotted by helicopter and satellite. But tracking an underwater plume is a much more complicated task, which thus far appears confined to one lonely improvising research vessel whose crew had been planning to hunt shipwrecks.

Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska marine conservationist who recently spent more than a week on the Gulf Coast, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration risks wildly underestimating the damage caused by the massive spill.

"If you don't look, you won't find, and they're not looking in the right places," Steiner told the Huffington Post.

Most major oil spills occur right at the surface, he explained. This one is entirely different.

With a spill this deep, the oil starts off extremely dense and under pressure. Some of it breaks up or dissolves into the water on the way up, and some of it makes it all the way to the surface. But some will "stabilize in the water column" maybe as low as 200 to 300 meters off the seabed, Steiner said. "Then it starts drifting with the current."

"I'm virtually certain that a lot of this oil hasn't even surfaced yet," he said. "What we don't know is the trajectory and direction of this subsurface toxic plume."

That's critically important information, both in order to assess what sorts of habitats the oil may be wiping out, and because "this stuff can pop up in surprising places, weeks if not months from now," he said.

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/13/wheres-the-oil-your-gover_n_575647.html

As sure as the sun is hot, we are being lied to about the size of this disaster!

It leaked about 3 million barrels, but only a third or so made it to the surface.

Ha ha ha. What a great joke to play on them!

Somebody did a report on a treated area and it was saturated with oil blobs beneath the surface. It was like shaking a bottle of salad dressing. Anything they put in it came out coated. Breaking up slicks and getting rid of the oil are apparently not the same thing.

(Was showing 21 recs earlier yet when I click on "Recommend", it went to 19 ...)

I can understand the extreme pro-nuke & anti-nuke rec games that go on but I
really can't see why people unrec something as informative & worrying as this OP.

:wtf: