Where's The Oil? Your Government Doesn't Really Know

For more than three weeks now, at least 200,000 gallons of crude oil a day has been erupting out of a pipe a mile underneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

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 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.
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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.

Another aspect of this spill that's unusual is the widespread use of chemical dispersants, applied both at the source and on the surface. Oil sprayed with dispersants on the surface, for instance, breaks into small droplets -- which could then remain suspended in the water column, Steiner said.
There's a lot more:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/13/wheres-the-oil-your-gover_n_575647.html

Gah! Just gah!

Such people should not be taken seriously.

I'm sure they'll survive.

but if we continue to use our oceans as a toilet, how much longer will they survive? Earth has remarkable recovery processes, but at some point, even the size of the planet will not overcome the activity of 7 billion toxic lifeforms.

We're destroying our ecosystem for the profit of a few.

"More than half, 53%, say its economic benefits outweigh its potential environmental harm, according to the poll of 1,000 adults taken May 6-10. The poll has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points."

I guess we'll be testing that belief over the next few weeks, months and years.

Article: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/05/should-us-expand-offshore-oil-drilling-poll-finds-most-still-say-yes/1

no news on this and no photos on front pages of oiled animals.

I think an equally powerful image is that of the people whose livelihoods are destroyed by this.

Whole communities based around fishing, shrimp, oysters, which are quite possibly over. Kaput. All the related businesses. Transportation. Boating. Tourism. Etc.

I don't say this to belittle the importance of seeing what happens to the animals, but it's a lot easier for people to write that off as environmentalist foo-foo. The hard, cold reality is that all of those dying birds are also representing a real struggle for a huge population of people too. And the food supply of the whole country.

Regardless, the whole thing is overwhelmingly terrible. :(

"Persons" are going to do what they are going to do, no matter what the American Subject Populace wants or thinks.

...if it entirely engulfs and drags beneath the waves every Carribean island. It's the whole "If Katrina happened in Connecticut..." thing.

PB

with only the tip showing on the surface. Think 3D.

That this time around, both the government and BP are trying to keep this from "looking bad" by using dispersants to keep the oil from surfacing and causing visible harm to the ocean from the air, having it go on to the beaches, and showing a lot of oil covered birds that has given bad PR to who was responsible for past oil spills.

And Hartmann notes that though things will "look better", that by using dispersants instead of coagulants, it will create a lot more havoc under the sea with a "dead zone" of the toxic dispersant chemicals along with the oil that is saturated in the ocean water and other life forms there. Said that coagulants, though looking worse, would provide a better way to contain the problem so that it could be cleaned up easier without as much damage to the eco system.

Sadly, I think he's right. And this is such a symptom of both our government and business these days. Everything to dress up the short term outlook of everything, whether it be the short term profitability or image of a company for the stock market, or looking like things are being put under control before the upcoming elections.

A solution that fixes nothing, and in fact, makes things much worse down the line.

In exchange for some PR mileage gotten out of suppression/diversion of reality by artificial means.

This is where we live. Maybe it has always been where we lived, but we just couldn't see it. But now, it's getting so obvious on all front that the PR effort seems to be refocusing from outright denial/suppression to channeling the peassantry's slow realization into Corporate Friendly avenues.

Thanks for the thread, grits.

Science journalist Mark Schrope is aboard the research vessel Pelican, which is spending the week studying the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Check back to The Great Beyond for daily mission updates.

I'm on my way to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill zone, some 220 kilometres southeast of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico, aboard the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium's 35-metre research vessel Pelican, part of the US research fleet.

The seven scientists aboard, from the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology, a NOAA-funded cooperative effort based at the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi, had originally been scheduled to study and map formations where methane seeps from the seafloor, and historically significant shipwrecks with funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. After the disaster they decided to put that work on hold so they could study the spill.

This is the ship's second trip to the area. Last week they took water and sediment samples at various sites in and around the spill zone to begin answering questions about how the oil is behaving in the water, such as how much is sinking and how fast. Then on Saturday night the team came in to pick up an array of new equipment that would allow them to expand their efforts, a port call that allowed me to join expedition at the last minute.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/05/oil_spill_science_the_mission.html



I've been following this blog.