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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!
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
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. . . .
Great. So the oil is nicely contained in dense plumes. BP just needs to stick a giant straw into the plumes and suck that stuff right up :-)
As an immigrant from a 3rd world, and after watching American and British and lately chinese interests eat away resources such as forests and minerals, and watching western oil companies pollute and then using economic blackmail to suppress voices, I personally feel this is a positive thing.
Crap close to home seems to be the only way Americans learn - so some pollution close by is always good.
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.
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);
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.
Bear in mind that several years ago, BP merged with another company and kept the BP name. That company? Amoco. AMerican Oil COmpany.
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.
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?
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601072&sid=aUqFB_GbhRYM
Haiti's 7.0 earthquake "may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, [Stephen Pierce, a geologist] said yesterday in a telephone interview."
What earthquakes do not do is drill a hole 18,000 feet deep.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The disasters would happen, but they wouldn't all happen in the same century.
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.
Protons are protons you fucking idiot yes the sun radiates nuclear radiation
There is no "extreme left" in the United States. Liberal in the US is the equivalent of centrist to slightly conservative in Europe.
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.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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)
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
Damnit, I knew we should have bombed Swederland when we had the chance!
which is totally what she said
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
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."