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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."
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."
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?
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Sarah Palin...
is out parasailin'.
As reported by the WSJ
The insistence of the political mainstream to stick to slogans is so backwards... This includes both the conservatives and liberals.
BP. British Petroleum.
Hold my beer and watch this!
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...
Yes, that evil, American oil company: British Petroleum.
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
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?....
Well, in all fairness, I'm sure that rig was manned by illegal immigrants, rather than properly trained Americans(TM). She's working the root of the problem.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
All we need to do is drink the milkshake.
So, you're saying that because a company got greedy, wasn't regulated well enough, and fucked something up, that means we should stop doing it? Wow, that's rational. So I guess if I fall down the stairs today everyone should stop using stairs? Yeah, we as a society should be hellbent on renewable energy and kicking the oil addiction, but in the meantime, I'd prefer to drill locally instead of bleeding out money in the form of foreign oil imports. Really, are you making the argument that because things can go wrong they shouldn't be done under proper regulation, or are you being irrational to accuse Palin of being stupid? So yeah, I'll say it: drill baby drill...along with the less popular 'regulate baby regulate' and 'research baby research'.
Previously known as Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which is a bit less catchy these days.
Actually BP no longer stands for British Petroleum officially, but meh.. No large company is anchored too heavily to its country of origin.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
These idiots used DRILL BABY DRILL as a campaign slogan. Now they want to forget that ever happened.
If you can't handle the leak, you shouldn't be drilling that deep underwater. Period.
You can't just drop a nuke on the seafloor and expect it to close the well. All it'll gonna do is blow away the sediment, leaving the well open. In order to close it, you'll have to drill into solid rock, lower the nuke down there and blow it to collapse the original well. At this point, you can as well do a relief drilling and shut it down with mud. Nuking a blowout makes sense only when you don't have the capability to geo-steer a relief drill precisely enough to hit the original hole. We can do that now, and it won't take much more time than drilling for a nuke. We could nuke the BP headquarters, though - that might help...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
That's a bit silly. If you round the spill up to 10 billion gallons, by the time it fully disperses, it will constitute much less than 1 part per trillion of the ocean.
I can see being wary of gulf catch, but why worry about stuff from New England?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Bear in mind that several years ago, BP merged with another company and kept the BP name. That company? Amoco. AMerican Oil COmpany.
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
That's like saying the sun naturally releases lots of radiation so it's okay to go jump into a nuclear reactor. The organisms around natural leaks are vastly different and have adapted to such locations over hundreds of thousands of years. And it's not like that 2000bbp, which I'll just take your word for, is all out of one location either. You can't just go pour oil over everything and then go, "Well oil naturally occurs so it'll be fine!" Really rather absurd.
Oh, so you have an economical, reliable method for:
* pumping millions of tons of oxygen
* almost a mile below the ocean's surface
* and dissolving it in trillions of gallons of water
Goddamn armchair engineers... Seriously, you're about as divorced from reality as BP's PR team.
you americans are fucked, hahah. thats what you get with your evil oil companies.
Actually, it's what Americans get when they let a British oil company deploy a Swiss drilling platform with German companies responsible for safety. Massive US lobbying efforts by BP also contributed to the lack of regulation, all in the name of international fairness and free trade.
And historically, Europe's record on oil spills is far worse than that of the US. Of course, being obedient little nationalists, Europeans love to find fault with the US while their own governments are screwing them.
Hopefully, as a result of this disaster, the US will severely limit the ability of foreign companies to lobby in the US, and hopefully it will kick out European oil companies with their poor safety records once and for all.
It isn't as bad as the Ixtoc I spill that went on for 9 months and didn't kill the gulf. That was 30,000 barrels per day for 9 months.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
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.
A few hundred feet probably won't do it - the sediment layer is huge in the gulf, and you definitely want to collapse the solid rock beneath. On the topic of the headquarters, yeah, it would probably be an overreaction to nuke London, I like the place, too. I am European, btw - and in my opinion, the place of origin of the corporation in question is irrelevant - there are no European or American corporations, those entities hold no loyalty or allegiance to their place of origin anyway, they exist in a whole different universe...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Protons are protons you fucking idiot yes the sun radiates nuclear radiation
It isn't as bad as the Ixtoc I spill that went on for 9 months and didn't kill the gulf. That was 30,000 barrels per day for 9 months.
Maybe you aren't keeping up with the news - current estimates based on actual observations of the oil flowing out of the hole is 50,000 barrels a day, making it worse than Ixtoc 1's peak flow rate (the number you gave). But Ixtoc 1 "only" released a total of 3 million barrels over those 9 months, an average flow rate more like 10,000 barrels a day.
Deep Horizon looks like it will only take 60 days to break the world record for an accidental oil spill, and we are now in day 30, with no estimate of when it is likely to be shut down (though that relief well, touted to be the real fix will take at least 3 months).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Don't tell that to the homeopaths.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
There is no "extreme left" in the United States. Liberal in the US is the equivalent of centrist to slightly conservative in Europe.
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.
I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine, goes by the name of "learned helplessness".
With the exception of the occasional mulishly idealistic college student, most people don't take long to stop caring much about things over which they have absolutely no power.
It's a publicly traded multinational corporation. The world's fourth largest, in fact. I think it's pretty much transcended nationality. The CEO is Swedish, FWIW.
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There is no "extreme left" in the US just like there is no "Left", "Right", "Extreme Right", or "Central".
All of these terms are made up to make us think that we still have a choice. To make us think that this isn't for all intents and purposes a one party system.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
You are almost right except this: No amount of Government intervention (regulation) can do anything about all possible ways someone may fuck up in all different companies in all different sectors of economy.
Have the Government do what it should do on behalf of the People: Sue the Shit out of BP, Halliburton and Transocean, get the damages, cleanup and x100 or x1000 liability as a way to scare the fuck of all the other companies who are pumping oil, gas, digging coal etc etc etc
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.
You have to do it. Have to distribute the punishment to the guilty and be consistent about it. That's the way to avoid the future 'calamities' like this one.
You can't handle the truth.
Knows about what? The oil spill? I'm pretty sure everyone knows that there is a really bad oil spill in the gulf by now.
Mobilization has begun. There are already crews attempting to stop the leak, and crews attempting clean up.
Perhaps you should go donate blood to the red cross. It'll make you feel better.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
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?
We are basically bombarded with completely irrelevant bad news 24/7.
Turn on the TV or radio, fire up a web browser, pick up a newspaper... You'll read about some random person who got kidnapped on the other side of the planet. Or a nasty plane crash somewhere. Or a tsunami.
Yeah, it's sad that somebody is suffering somewhere... But it's really got absolutely no bearing on my life.
And then we're bombarded with big stuff that is relevant, but we can't do anything about it.
Things like the volcano in Iceland, or the oil spill in the gulf. Yeah, it affects me... But there's really nothing I can personally do about it. Maybe throw some money at it in the form of a donation or two... Which might help... But there's absolutely no immediate feedback that I'm doing something to alleviate the problem.
And then we're bombarded with random scary stuff that doesn't even necessarily have a basis in reality.
Somebody, somewhere said that they wanted to kill the President - so now we're at threat level plaid, be afraid! There's some random bowl game coming up and terrorists would love to blow it up, be afraid! Mashed potatoes cause Alzheimers, be afraid! Obamacare is going to destroy Social Security, be afraid!
Is it any wonder that we've learned to tune all that out and just keep chugging along in our day-to-day lives?
It's either that, or stop functioning entirely.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
So the fix is to pump O2 into the wellhead?
Learn to love Alaska
Damnit, I knew we should have bombed Swederland when we had the chance!
which is totally what she said
"Previously known as Anglo-Iranian Oil Company," of Operation Ajax fame. The wikipedia has a decent article on Operation Ajax - maybe some people would like to look at it. The United States literally overthrew a legitimate government, for the sake of BP's profits. Not something that the UK or the US government readily admits to.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Lemme guess. You're still in school - or at least you're very recently graduated. I'm not apathetic, myself, but at age 54, I'm getting there. No matter how bad the news, how dire the warnings, or how hopeless the situation, EVERYONE AROUND ME is an apathetic jackass. Phht. There is no "mobilization". We'll just continue to swirl around and around, until we finally get sucked down the toilet, and find ourselves in the septic tank.
Even then - MOST PEOPLE JUST WON'T FUCKING CARE!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
No large company is anchored too heavily to its country of origin.
Tell me about it. A few weeks ago, I was posting on another forum about banking, and was recounting how a bank account that I've had for years started out as a regional S&L, and through about 4 or 5 mergers finally ended up being with Bank of America. While researching Bank of America's history in order to get my facts straight, I saw this gem on the Bank of America wiki page.
Bank of America's history dates to 1904, when Amadeo Giannini founded the Bank of Italy in San Francisco....
Somehow I don't see them playing that bit of their history up what with their Stars and Stripes logo and all.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
BP's corporate headquarters are still firmly rooted in the UK, and all major corporate decisions come out of corporate home base. Trust me, I work for them.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
But we can make BP wish they'd never been so reckless, and give pause to any company still cutting corners on the safety.
Can we really do that?
Stop driving gas guzzlers. Don't fill up at BP gas stations.
Haven't you heard? BP is now Beyond Petroleum. They, as well as pretty much all the big oil companies, are diversifying. They're now energy companies. If we don't buy their gasoline we'll be buying their electricity, or hydrogen, or whatever else.
Use other means of transport or propulsion.
Where I live, there's no public transportation.
Assuming there was public transportation... It'd still be running off some sort of energy, which would likely wind up lining some irresponsible corporation's pockets.
Fire off angry letters to Congress.
Except that this isn't just a national problem. These are international companies acting irresponsibly all over the world.
It may not sound like much, but enough people doing these things will hit them where they live.
Except that it probably won't.
These guys are hired to make the company money - nothing more. Nobody cares what kind of collateral damage there is. As long as the stockholders make money, they're happy.
And even if somebody actually gets fired over this... They've probably got plenty of money to tide themselves over until they get another job with another giant corporation that'll do exactly the same thing.
Hell... Absolute worst-case scenario they just re-brand themselves and pretend like the old corporation is dead while continuing to do business-as-usual under a new name.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
While that is ordinarily not a reason to trust you, I guess I'll trust you on this. ;)
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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."
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?
Yeah - as someone who has been through 4 mergers, it's the "tow-mah-tow" to acquisition's "tow-may-tow". Probably there are differences in accounting and filings to regulatory agencies, but within each company, what ever name was kept was the winner.
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
Perhaps you should go donate blood to the red cross. It'll make you feel better.
The Red Cross is doing just fine..
Net Assets $2,559,637,123
We have determined that this charity has a privacy policy which requires you to tell the charity to remove your name and contact information from mailing lists it sells, trades or shares.
They sell my blood for $200 a pint and then sell my name and address as a blood donor.
executives get in trouble for failing to meet fiduciary responsibility if they don't do everything in their power to increase value for shareholders.
I hear this a lot in rants about capitalism, but do you have any examples of this actually happening? I'm familiar with fiduciary duty. I just want to see some example(s) of this occurring in a public company. thanks.
Speak for yourself. I live in Orange County, CA. It's about as pedestrian / public transit unfriendly as you can get. Still, I do not own a car and I get around just fine (I walk about 50 miles a week, but that's doable). Before that I lived in Moscow, Idaho. I did not own a car there either, and there is absolutely no public transit. However, since it's a small town I was able to walk everywhere I needed to go. The problem's not that you can't do it, it's that you don't want to make the lifestyle choices you'd need to in order to do it.