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Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Below the Gulf's Surface
An anonymous reader sends in a NY Times article about the spread of oil from the BP gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. Quoting:
"Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given. ... The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes. Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. ... [Scientists on the Pelican mission] suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly. ... Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome, since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the plumes."
you americans are fucked, hahah. thats what you get with your evil oil companies.
We should call BP big polluter now!
New York Times: "Scientists Find Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf" * gushing 80,000 barrels a day * The well is 5,000-feet down. * The shallowest oil plume is 2,300 feet down. * The deepest bubble of oil is 4,200 feet down. * Will bubble up for decades. * At most 5% of the spilled oil will ever be recovered. "one big oil bubble is 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick."
That's going to be a big problem for all those people who live below the surface of the water in the Gulf of Mexico. Also for the people who live in boats floating over 5000 feet of water. What are all those people going to do?
Haven't heard her say "Drill Baby Drill" in weeks. C'mon teabaggers - I can't hear you!
I've been reading a little about oil dispersants. I understand that basically they help to break down oil so that microorganisms can do their thing and use the oil as food. Maybe an oversimplification, but that is what I got out of it.
So now if you use oil dispersants, do you end up exacerbating the oxygen problem? If the microorganisms go nuts on the food supply, does this kill off even more of the ecosystem?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
As reported by the WSJ
telling all of us how much we should appreciate our fine new immigration law.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
The government has "top men" working on this. Who? "Top men".
Besides, it's silly to think there could be oil elsewhere than the surface.
Yes, there's no value (to us) in trying to determine exactly how badly we've screwed things... It's not like a better estimate would be useful in calculating a level of effort for the cleanup, possibly quantity of cleanup materials, or potential ocean chemistry changes.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
}"substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given"
Was there ever any doubt that it would be worse...?
No sig today...
If humans never (or, say before humans did so) drilled for oil, wouldn't the oil still be there, and occasionally be released by events such as earthquakes?
It's basically a natural organic substance, not a product of man (like artifical pesticides, nuclear waste, etc), so wouldn't the earth's ecosystem have dealt with it before/if we wern't around?
Or is there something done to prepare the oil before it's extracted (like injection of chemicals) that makes it unnatural?
I'm not saying this isn't a terrible disaster, but, disasters just happen sometimes.
The free market will fix this. People will stop putting BP gas in their car and BP will go out of business. Leading others to clean up the spill, garner goodwill with the public, and have consumers put that company's gas in their car.
Right?
Right?....
Big Oil doesn't care. How much money are they losing by this accident alone? You think that would be enough motivation for them to take proper steps to prevent or contain this sort of event rapidly.
The sad truth is, the Oil industry is the untouchable vector. Since every other sector of society depends on it, you cant regulate it like any other market. At best it is handled with kid gloves, at worst, it isn't handled at all, and in fact given green lights by the powerful elite for unthinkable exploration ventures.
It is a clear indicator to me just how much the Oil industry cares when Exxon is still trying to weasel their way out of the Valdez spill. Having the BP President come out and state they would cover 'legitimate claims' was a publicity stunt to quell present and future locale economic fears, nothing more. When this is all said and done, and the pen hits the check book, this will head to court and be fought out there over the span of years, if not decades. I've seen no behavior by the Oil industry to give me reason they won't re-neg that 'verbal stop-gap'.
or they could end up poisoning the oceans globally, you know that ocean's circulates and what is in the gulf of mexico will soon be in the atlantic and mediterranean, and eventually find its way in to the indian and pacific oceans,
even if they stopped it today i wont trust seafood anymore ever.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
All we need to do is drink the milkshake.
The bacteria need small bits of oil and lot of oxygen to eat the oil why not in addition to breaking up the oil pump oxygen from the surface down to the depleted areas. Sure it will end up with mass amounts of CO2 in the water but then also make that area ripe for an algae/plankton bloom and then things would start to get better. That is help the other parts of the natural cycle. Maybe add in some bicarb to help keep the ph where it should be. Sure throwing chemicals into the water is bad, be we have already done that, now we need to add others to counteract the effects and neutralize things back to the state they were in before the spill.
Give the microbes the oxygen they need to feed on the oil, and then give the other algae/plankton what they need to eat the microbes and make more oxygen. Speed up what would naturally happen over the next 30+ years without human intervention. The planet is fairly good at correcting things on it own just not in time scale we can see, or if part of the correction lower the habitability for humans we may not see it, but the earth will eventually recover to its normal ebb and flow.
It is like helping an old lady across the street. Sure she could do it on her own but with some boy/girl scouts there they can help her across faster and safer.
All this really means is that some of the fishing industry in the gulf will change to oil gathering.
And isn't it a good thing that the refineries are so close by?
They might call it Gulf Oil. Oh wait that name is already taken.
What is most amazing about this is that an oil rig caused it with a drilled hole.
Hasn't nature ever done such a thing as leak oil in the ocean?
I always wondered what was oil holding up that when we take it out of the ground...
In comparison to other man made disasters, like deforestation, where does it really rank?
Dead Sea II
Seriously. You can mod this a troll if you feel better. But I would much rather there be a small area of radiation from a tactical nuclear explosion, than the entire gulf coast destroyed the biggest oil spill in the history of mankind and one that will just keep on going and keep getting worse.
I know folks have bad feeling about nukes, but for fucks sake..it worked 4 out of 5 times for the Russians. It's time to do it before it's too late!
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/62992,news-comment,news-politics,deepwater-horizon-gulf-mexico-oil-spill-should-bp-nuke-the-leak-like-the-russians
These idiots used DRILL BABY DRILL as a campaign slogan. Now they want to forget that ever happened.
I find curious how apathetic people are these days.
It's like a toon character:
"Hey! Look! The Earth is being destroyed!"
"Yo, man! That sucks!"
Earth may be doomed, but is there hope for us?
So maybe this is a stupid question, but why can't they just design a big plug and stick it in the pipe? Would that cause the pipe to rupture or something? Or try to reroute the oil by attaching a big to the pipe that's spewing oil?
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
If we let the Gulf fill with oil, The petro industry can't tell us there is a shortage again.
Since we can't seem to really do anything about it, lets all make up nasty oil industry jokes and shame the whole industry into ... the Gulf of Mexico.
As much money that goes through the oil industry, you'd think they would have installed a shut off valve. Of wait, they don't want to shut it off so why would they have installed a valve? (don't no body say they did, for it they really did, it'd been shut off by now) Instead they try to funnel it...
Maybe if they actually focused on shutting it, they might just figure it out.
And since they don't really want to shut of off, it must not be so serious.
Who owns the oil in the water? Does BP hold all claims to it?
There isn't enough oxygen in the water to metabolize all that oil in time to prevent a disaster.
No sig today...
This situation is only going to get worse. And worse. And worse. I can see it coming. Eventually, when thousands upon thousands of people who depend on the Gulf for their livelihood are put out of business, who is going to pay? Exxon didn't pay (in full), so I expect BP won't be paying up either. Oh they'll pay some, and put up a good effort to clean up the mess, but the damage will become so widespread that most of their efforts will be in vain. And all those people who depend on the Gulf will be out of work and will essentially lose everything.
Who Pays?
BP should pay. Even if it means the company goes out of business entirely. Sell off all their assets if necessary to pay the people who no longer can support themselves. Stockholders, you lose. You are in fact the owners of the company, and your company is responsible for the damages (federal 75 million liability cap be damned). Why should a Gulf worker lose everything and you keep on truckin with your BP stock?
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
The dispersant Corexit is itself toxic, which means BP is adding more poison to hide the first.
The one great advantage of Corexit, however, is that it makes the oil sink below view, so BP is literally hoping, like a naughty toddler, that out of sight means out of mind. A few weeks from now, when dead fish begin piling up on the shore and people ask "What's up with all the stinking fish?" you can depend on Pat Robertson to blame the homosexuals, Sarah Palin to blame the liberals and Fox news to report on the new terrorist attack on the Gulf.
And we'll believe it.
But, Dear God, I hope not. As much as I hate to say it, I think the previous vicious AC poster is right -- killing the Gulf of Mexico might be the only thing that gets our attention and forces us to make better choices.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
There's been quite a lot of speculation that the numbers estimated by BP are low. BPs response has essentially been "that won't help us stop the leak, so stuff it". Well, that's not really true, since to know how effective something is you need to be able to measure before and after. There's also the obvious problem of the aftermath, and understanding how large it will be.
Frankly, I think BP releasing how much oil is leaking represents a HUGE conflict of interest for them. I believe they know the flow rate is substantially higher than the original estimates. But why would they want to release that information? Attempting to keep the numbers low limits their potential damage payout. It also would be a huge PR nightmare if the numbers are even bigger. In the long term there's going to be a TON of lawsuits. Many of them are going to be dependent on the scientific data to support them. The amount of oil leaked is obviously going to be a BIG factor. The larger the amount of oil leaked, the larger the damage right? So BP is essentially trying to play dumb, and hope that the original estimates will stick, thus limiting their liability.
To get a handle on this it's very clear we need real numbers on how much oil is leaking. The position that stopping the leak is the only thing that matters is ridiculous. The problem doesn't go away after they stop the leak. Solving the large term damage left by this is obviously partially dependent on knowing how much oil has leaked into the Gulf. Being potentially off by an order of magnitude is in no way acceptable.
AccountKiller
My vote is for Beautiful Plumage.
Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
Mr. Praline: The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
Old news. This story was making the science rounds early last week. It is a devastating spill, and it is depleting subsurface oxygen, but the scare tactics are not helping anyone clean it up.
Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by tenure.
It should become quite a lot clearer fairly soon, now that they are trapping some of the leaks.
The maximum amount they are trapping can be easily calculated by watching the boats they use to transport it away, and the change in the Gulf over the next couple of weeks can be used to estimate if they are staunching a lot of it or not.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And the sea is far more overfished now. A cold when you're healthy is shrugged off. A cold when you're already starving and hypothermic will kill you.
In 1979 Newfoundland was still a massive fish nursery. The ocean flow past there comes from the Gulf.
And the fish there are already in far far greater trouble: http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/cbio/cancod.html
You can't assume that the column of oil is made of 100% oil. The oil might be dispersing into the water immediately upon exiting the pipe, making the column a mixture of oil and water.
Think of faucet in your kitchen or bath. Many have aerators on the nozzle that serve to mix the water with air. These aerators increase the size of the column of water, making it appear that a larger volume of water is coming out of the faucet.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
can wind power make pantyhose?
Oil FLOATS on water, dumbasses.
I'm certainly not an expert at any of the respective areas of science this involves, but does anyone know if we could re-oxygenate the water even on a temporary basis? Jokes about bubbling skeleton pirate treasure chests aside, would it be possible to run tubing down to the floor of the affected areas and pump air in? I realize we're talking about a large area and this wouldn't be a small task but would that at least temporarily solve this particular part of the problem?
Why not make up a huge long extra strong heat resistant open ended plastic bag to bring this oil up to the surface. Something like a huge long chimney. The oil eating bateria could be added at the bottom to ride the oil up and start working on it early. Then once you get all that oil up to the top suck it up into oil tankers and take it away to reprocess. I'm sure that they 'BP' can get some good oil out of it to help offset the cost of this cleanup.
Just a thought...Perhaps a very uneducated one...But I'm just thinking out loud here...We already use chimneys to move the out gasing further up above us. So why not use the same principle to move the oil closer to us for collection instead of leaving it sitting underwater with the potential disaster it could cause.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
I might be a little late to the party, but I haven't seen anyone yet do the calculation I was expecting to see... just how much volume is that 10mi x 3mi x 300 ft plume?
Well once you convert everything to meters, and observe 264 gallons per cubic meter, you get a staggering 1.8 trillion gallons of ocean water in that plume. If even 1% of that is oil, then we are totally fucked. Hopefully it's less than 0.01%.
However, if you calculate from the surface slick itself, you have 3650 sq miles of slick (as of Friday). And based on a chart of oil-thickness-to-color, you could say that the oil slick is 50 micrometers thick. This equates to 125 million gallons of pure oil just on the surface. Over the course of 25 days, that's about 5 million gallons per day just making it to the surface! Is anyone else getting concerned?
the government isn't going to touch this, if they did BP could say the government messed things up, as it stands now the accident and the handling thereof are 100% BP's problem and court cases against BP will be easier than if the government had gotten involved.
btw, BP isn't interested in sealing the well, if they do that law makers might not let them drill again, so their goal isn't to stop the flow but to try to rig up some sort of working well again.
Like the parent said. True, the most that most of us can do about the leak now is stay out of the way of the professionals trying to stop it.
But we can make BP wish they'd never been so reckless, and give pause to any company still cutting corners on the safety. Stop driving gas guzzlers. Don't fill up at BP gas stations. Use other means of transport or propulsion. Fire off angry letters to Congress. It may not sound like much, but enough people doing these things will hit them where they live.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
"oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the plumes." Well, let's get the little buggers some oxygen! They're on our side, they should be getting all the help they need. Let's get an aircraft carrier in there, and use the power from the reactors to pump as much oxygen down to them as is necessary.
Good and valid question however I'm not confident it's possible. There are 2 approaches that I can think of, based on work I've done on inland waters and estuaries.
The first is to destabilise vertical stratification and allow for more rapid downwards mixing of oxygen from the surface. Stratification forms a barrier to the vertical exchange of oxygen from the surface to the depths. This works in lakes and reservoirs, but I would guess would be impractical on a scale this large. Consider the system would effectively need to break down the potential energy of stratification over many thousands of square meters. My guess would be the power needed would be a few watts per square m (the sun provides around 200W/m2 of heating, a small amount of which contributes to water column stability). So even for a 10x10km area, a constant power input of 1x10^8 W would be required.
The second option is to inject oxygen directly. There are huge technical difficulties with this approach, especially in warm salt water. The saturation concentration of oxygen is low, and injection of oxygen above saturation leads to bubble formation and degassing. So an o2 injection system could not deposit large concentrations of 02 and allow it to disperse. Again, I don't think this would work. The use of hydrogen peroxide would probably have similar restrictions.
I'm not prepared to accept the consequences of a completely out of control well.. like a lost wellhead. We shouldn't be drilling down there until we can do it in an intrinisically safe manner.. that means, technology has to work to keep the well open, not technology has to work to close the well (like the current BOP systems) As bad as this is, it could have been even worse.
The dispersant Corexit is itself toxic, which means BP is adding more poison to hide the first.
The one great advantage of Corexit, however, is that it makes the oil sink below view, so BP is literally hoping, like a naughty toddler, that out of sight means out of mind. A few weeks from now, when dead fish begin piling up on the shore and people ask "What's up with all the stinking fish?" you can depend on Pat Robertson to blame the homosexuals, Sarah Palin to blame the liberals and Fox news to report on the new terrorist attack on the Gulf.
And we'll believe it.
But, Dear God, I hope not. As much as I hate to say it, I think the previous vicious AC poster is right -- killing the Gulf of Mexico might be the only thing that gets our attention and forces us to make better choices.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
How about a mile (or so) long 30'-50' diameter rugged/oil proof fabric tube that goes down to the bottom over the leak and goes all the way to the surface. It could flare out at the top to as big as need be and have 10' high walls. All the oil would stay in the tube, with the surface the only place to go, from there it could easily be siphoned into ships. It really shouldn't be that hard to make such a "sock". I would think it would definitely be easier than all the difficult solutions they have tried so far.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
What gets me the most with all of this is that people STILL calling it an "oil spill", WTF?
to code or not to code, that is the question.
Anyone else notice that BP's attempts to fix their mess all involve recovering the oil, and they've not tried anything that involves sealing off the well? Are they trying to prevent environmental disaster or are they trying to maximize profits?
Trusted reports indicate criminal activites by officials at the Department of Interior, Department of Homeland Security, and the Executive Office of the President Barak Hussain Obama.
This is the simple reason for the breakdown of regulation regarding safty, operations, and communications.
President Barak Hussain Obama and all of his appointed subordinates are guilty of Crimes Against Humanity.
Let their heads roll upon the Capital Mall; Let their lifeless bodies be hung upside-down from street polls along the Capital Mall.
May Hell welcome them, one and all. May Hell forgive them, one and all. For we the Living, will damn them and burn them, one and all.
When we passed by a BP the other day, I passed it and went for the Flying J, since BP hasn't fixed the problem yet and is letting it get worse. I refuse to give any financial support to a company that can't handle a crisis of this magnitude. They should have learned from Exxon's mistakes, they should have known better. I just don't care, they should have known better. If they can let the rest of us suffer, then they need to burn for it.
Nobody is that stupid. Sure they'll be happy to fuck up your shit, but they'll make sure theirs is nice and pretty,
We begin today's lesson with a discussion of the horrific history of the Rapa Nui and Easter Island. We'll draw a line from that ancient environmental disaster to the current situation in Los Angeles where the ditance between "your fucked-up shit" and "my pretty shit" is currently the width of one street in most places.
We all breathe the same air, we drink the same water. Ultimately, it all "our shit." Today's homework is Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" for a discussion about how well separating the Rich from the Poor works.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Do this: destroy the fucking BP if necessary and also, screw the corporate protection, arrest the management, arrest whoever wasn't doing the job right and also put every single prick from MMS (that's the Government agency literally is fucking with the corporate whores, literally) to jail for 10 consecutive life sentences. Or shoot them Chinese style.
And then no oil company will work without having full insurance cover, and insurance companies will charge a gargantuan fortune to run that kind of risk, and the cost of fuel rises to compensate, and the price of your dinner goes up 4x or 5x every year. Congratulations, you've just destroyed society.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
No, it's about the same as when a government says: "funding Project X will cost Y."
Because there's no accountability for bullshitting in parliament, most people I know now just assume that the government is full of shit, and that Y costs somewhere between 10x and 100x the actual estimate. For a good example, look at the initial estimates for the Olympics in various areas. The initial estimates are always lowballed, and then costs start pumping up and up and up once things get going.
Complain about O2 now, while you still can. Once a big storm rolls around the gulf, the O2 levels will be back to normal. The reason why the gulf of mexico is a good place to drill for oil IS the storms. Anything that can be fixed by agitation, will get fixed. Most of the problems of oil, can be fixed with vigorous agitation.
everyone knows its got to be at least 800 feet.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
I read elsewhere on the internets that they've done oxygen testing near the plumes (sorry, can't find the link again), and dissolved O2 levels are down by like 30% in the vicinity of the plumes. The theory is exactly what you say - microbes are busy devouring the oil, and using up oxygen in the process. There's a real fear that in addition to all the other bad effects of the oil, it will also increase the already growing "dead zones" - areas in which low oxygen concentration is destroying all animal life - in the Gulf.
There was an article in Salon that addressed this, and several commenters there brought up the point that to achieve the concentrations found harmful to corals would require an enormous amount of dispersant. In fact, they'd have to be pumping as much dispersant into the water at roughly the same rate the well is discharging oil into the water. Which seems pretty unlikely.