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Gulf Oil Spill Nearing Loop Current
An anonymous reader writes "Per The Weather Channel's tropical expert Dr. Richard Knabb, 'based on satellite images, model simulations, and on-site research vessel reports, I think it is reasonable to conclude that the oil slick at the surface is very near or partially in the Loop Current. The Loop Current is responsible in the first place for extending that stream of oil off to the southeast in satellite imagery. With its proximity to the northern edge of the Loop Current it may be only a matter of weeks or even days before the ocean surface oil is transported toward the Florida Keys and southeast Florida.'" Other experts are a little more cautious: "We know the oil has not entered the Loop Current," Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry said at a news conference Monday afternoon. "A leading edge sheen is getting close to it, but it has not entered the Loop Current. The larger volume of oil is several miles from the Loop Current."
slick!
I think this story is a little old now, oil is already at Key West.
Coast Guard: Tar Balls Found Off Key West, Fla.
POSTED: Monday, May 17, 2010
UPDATED: 11:26 pm EDT May 17, 2010
KEY WEST, Fla. -- The U.S. Coast Guard says 20 tar balls have been found off Key West, Fla., but the agency stopped short of saying whether they came from a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Some 5 million gallons of crude has spewed into the Gulf and tar balls have been washing ashore in several states along the coast.
Scientists are worried that oil is getting caught in a major ocean current that could carry it through the Florida Keys and up the East Coast.
The Coast Guard says the Florida Park Service found the tar balls on Monday during a shoreline survey. The balls were 3-to-8 inches in diameter.
Coast Guard Lt. Anna K. Dixon said no one at the station in Key West was qualified to determine where the tar balls originated. They have been sent to a lab for analysis.
Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
I wonder with both statements, if they refer to just what they can see from the surface, or what is under the surface. Just because a surface slick may be close to the loop, the majority of the oil may not be close at all, and vice verse. Either way its not good.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
I'm no geologist or really much of a scientist at all, but I recall the nuke thread and didn't really get to ask the question: why is nuking this oil well a bad idea? Everyones' initial response was "nuke it? haha, that's preposterous!" but I didn't really see an explanation of why its not a viable option?
Assuming it worked at stopping the continuing spill, what would be the negative effects? Assuming it didn't, what would be the negative effects of trying?
.
Several miles hunh? I feel perfectly safe.
"A leading edge sheen is getting close to it, but it has not entered the Loop Current. The larger volume of oil is several miles from the Loop Current."
Oh, so the inevitable hasn't happened yet. That's so reassuring.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The Atlantic can take a little oil spill no problem. BP has saved us again!
Look at the bright side. Now the satellite imagery of the loop current will be much easier to read with the oil tracer.
Perhaps if we got lots of boats with lots of fast spinning proppelers, we could whip it in to Cool-Whip. Then seafood will be extra tasty and tourism will go up.
what was that crass slogan again?
why don't i hear it anymore?
meant to appeal to low iq dimwits as a valid solution to the energy crisis? you know, buy us a couple more months of soccer moms in SUVs in suburban sprawl, before the inevitable? hey, what's a little ecosystem destruction when we need to go to walmart to buy plastic crap and mcdonalds to shovel more calories in our distended waistlines? why's it smell like oil near the beach mommy?
as the economy recovers, as newly rich brazilian, chinese, and indian economies begin to suck energy like the west, as the oil only gets deeper and deeper... welcome to a near future, 2015, 2020: $10 a gallon gas. except those brazilian, chinese, and indians: they are already seeking alternatives. you know like nuclear... NOT IN MY BACKYARD!
you were warned back in the 1970s. but you kept funding the saudis, who kept building wahhabi madrassas in pakistan, and you got 9/11. but you still didn't see the writing on the wall. in fact, you thought it was a good excuse to secure some iraqi oil
now you're destroying your own shorelines, and still living in denial, still a hopeless rationalizing junkie addict
when the inevitable comes, when we can no longer afford the gas guzzling lifestyle, many of you will say "who saw that coming?"
plenty of us did, jackass
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Guess I better go to the beach today while it's still a good place to be.
If you have a google account, check out this link. It adds the ArcGIS Server - Message in a Bottle applet to your google maps. Click the map and watch the "bottle" travel the path of the streamlines. Do it a couple times around the area of the oil spill and get a rough idea of the possible trajectories. Yes there are significant differences between an oil slick on top of the water and a glass bottle, but I have yet to find anywhere else public-ish facing where you can dynamically plot stream line points for free. Map experts/enthusiast?
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
The press is focussing too much on the "what if" and not the "what is."
First of all, how do we even know that the oil is harmful? There haven't been any long-term scientific studies on oil spills of this much oil of this kind. Why, for all we know, it might be beneficial! We shouldn't rush to judgement until this has been properly studied.
Second, let's stop using loaded terms like "pollution." Economists say we should measure the value of something by what people are willing to pay for it. Oil is worth $72 a barrel. The price of enough Instant Ocean to mix up a barrel of seawater is $8.72. So let's stop talking about oil as "polluting" seawater, let's be rational and unemotional and say that the oil is "enriching" the seawater.
Third, hasn't it occurred to anyone that this oil might prevent the harmful sea surges that did so much damage to New Orleans during the Katrina disaster? Let's stop berating BP when all they're really doing is pouring oil on the troubled waters.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I think you got a word wrong there. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry is not an other expert in this area at all. Any other [scientific] expert would never make such an absolutist statement, and a few miles is within a hour or two's drift (*spread is not necessarily the same rate as the water currents) so by the time her statement hit the papers it would already be false. And who knows what the hell's going on subsurface where the satellites don't see?
"Dispersal" of a slick into a cloud of droplets does not mean the cloud-plume itself has or will dispersed.
And why has the US gov't not put its foot down and demanded that the invited but then uninvited (by BP the day before they thought the dome would work) Wood's Hole team be allowed to measure the flow rate with the instruments that BP claimed did not exist? [NY Times 16 May] Even if there's nothing much we can do with that number now, by having better data about the size of the spill and measuring the effects over the coming months and years we can better understand and plan future responses. I see what BP has to lose by that number being properly established, but why aren't they being forced to establish it anyway?
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
There's a lot of discussion about this over at dailykos - apparently tarballs take a while to form, as opposed to the brownish goo seen on the "60 Minutes" piece. So if they're actually tarballs they're not from this release of oil. They're being analyzed.
I wonder how long will it take for nature to deliver that oil at the British Petroleum backyard.
From what Wikipedia says, this may not be BP's fault. Halliburton (the company famous for Iraq oil controversies including lying to the US administration) were cementing the well just a day before (by their own accounts). Transocean own the rig (renting it to BP) and their chief executive explained the cause of the incident saying, "there was a sudden, catastrophic failure of the cement, the casing or both."
No, it's not. Obama is president. He wouldn't let that happen. Presidents control the weather right? Bush caused Katrina.
Seriously. If the CEO of a major corporation, supposedly entrusted ( by the consent of the Federal Government) with safeguarding the environment while trying to make a buck on underground minerals, isn't held responsible for that corporation's actions, then we can expect to see a lot more of these environmental catastrophes.
Washington, are you paying attention ???
I think It's the only way to bring some much needed accountability to these problems...
Rachel Maddow has shown an interview named BP's haste lays waste to Gulf waters with a whistleblower from BP who explained that just a little before the disaster a BP manager told Transocean manager to do the work of putting in the corks into the well faster, so that the pumping of oil could be done faster. Aparently the Transocean manager was against it and they had an argument and BP won.
So it's mostly BP's fault, but I think still Transocean should not have complied with this clear violation of the procedure.
You can't handle the truth.
Was there any ever real doubt that a spill of this magnitude was not going to reach the loop?
Here in Fla we get to deal with all sorts of fun naturally occurring things. And I don't really begrudge those things much like those people who live inland in tornado ally don't really begrudge mother nature for those things.
But this...gah. And then on top of it I have to watch the super rich play the blame game? Fuck you. Seriously, fuck YOU.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
but japan and france have been nuclear dependent for decades, and i don't see many oil spills off their shores
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan
additionally, a lot of anti-nuclear opinions are based on 1960s era nuclear tech. new pebble bed reactors, air cooled: the staff can just walk away from these things, no melt down, no china syndrome
thorium can be used as a source (very abundant) if uranium (mined domestically) gets low. and breeder reactors can turn the waste, even old waste that exists today, into 1/10th the volume, that is only mildly radioactive, for only a century
and if we haven't figured out fusion by the time the uranium and thorium and oil runs out, well then we deserve to be doomed to the collapse of civilization
because i hope you realize, if we don't have a coherent energy source plan, as oil gets deeper and more consumed, that that is what we are headed for
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you hire the lowest bidder contractor to do your dirty (or illegal) work, and they mess it up (or get caught), it's still your responsibility.
i live in midtown manhattan, i walk everywhere. i don't own a car. no bike: i hate bikes, dangerous
and i am the future. as oil prices creep up inevitably, inexorably, and permanently, the suburbs will die. we'll live like our great granfathers: dense urban centers, lots of public transportation
so you better get used to my smugness, because your children and your grandchildren will be saying exactly what i am saying, "why didn't anyone plan ahead granddad? it was so obvious it was coming. can you walk me to the train granddad?"
plan or suffer, your choice
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
this is in fact the future: dense urban living
Did that during college: It's great and all, but I prefer to not have people peeing on my front door every weekend.
there is a reckoning coming. as the economy recovers, gas prices will begin a creep up that will never go down
As opposed to Manhattan rents?
According to NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, who was interviewed on last night's McNeil Lehrer News Hour, the oil entering the Loop will have minimal environmental impact in other parts of the Gulf. She opines that "By the time the oil is in the loop current, it's likely to be very, very diluted. And, so, it's not likely to have a very significant impact. It sounds scarier than it is."
The AntiJoey
high rent and people peeing on your front door, or $15/ gallon gasoline and lyme disease
the suburbs are an endangered species. really. plan ahead now
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
they were building dense cities 4,000 years ago on the nile
whatever is lost for moving food to the city is gained and then some by everyone not needing to drive 2 hours and sit in gridlock every day just to do their business
dense cities are the norm for humanity. dense cities make sense when all you have is sailing ships and mules. when oil goes to $15 a gallon, the cities will contract in size and normalcy will return after 50 years of cheap oil fueled insanity. suburban sprawl is an artificial endangered idiocy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Oh, BP is responsible for SO MUCH MORE than that. That company used to be known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, it drilled in Iran for decades before they got rid of the Shah. In 1951, when Iran finally had a democratically elected government, which decided to follow the wishes of the people and to nationalize the Oil fields and then provide APOC with a contract, which it hated, APOC went crying to UK and US politicians, and then the Democratically Elected Government of Iran was removed through a coup and APOC was once again free to do as it pleased, it got almost the contract that it wanted, it was less though, because there was just too much pressure from the people of Iran, who I think hated the guts of APOC.
APOC renamed to BP at that time probably as a way to whitewash its image, you know: Accenture (formerly known as Anderson Consulting) did the same after Enron.
BP is a very old and I would say evil entity, what I mean is that the processes in the company are such that from the outside the results of its work look evil.
You can't handle the truth.
Old news. Yes Halliburton is responsible for the well head and they are under investigation.
However, BP decided against emergency shut off valves because, "it cost to much." BP also lobbied the government that they did not need environmental impact studies or a detailed plan on how to clean up an oil spill since they claimed 165,000 gallons of oil would never reach the coast.
BP is very much at fault!
i want you to listen to reason: we need to get off oil now, or we will suffer
and you react like i'm trying to run your life?
no, i'm trying to wake you up from your ignorant complacency, and you are reacting like a teenager told by his mom he needs to stop playing videogames and start studying. that indolent sloth of a teenager would then say 'Look on the bright side. Now you have an outlet for all your self-righteous indignation. Nothing feels quite as good to someone trying to run other people's lives as saying "I told you so!"'
so you are basically saying that american energy policy is akin to a fat lazy useless teenager with a sense of spoiled entitlement... but i'm in the wrong because i'm pointing out the simple obvious truth that we're on the wrong path? is that your message to me?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... unless you happen to like seafood.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Have any of these researchers discussed what might happen when the hurricane season kicks in? Hurricanes have been known to churn up water from the deep, and I can only imagine the kind of mess that is coming when a category 3 or higher comes through the area where the oil slick is located. A storm surge loaded with oil would be quite a mess.
All 3 are responsible. They can sue each other later...
The thing to consider, though... how do you put a price on catastrophe? These companies don't really have enough money to compensate for it -- and in reality, since when could you ever compensate with MONEY something this ridiculously catastrophic to all things biological being affected.
we should force them to reinvest all of their money (which would/should be paid to the people anyway for such catastrophe) into renewable energy production and then allow them to sell it to us a lightly profitable rates.
It was Arthur Anderson accounting that was involved with Enron, not the Arther Anderson consulting business.
That doesn't really establish anything about the culture that might exist at Accenture, but it does establish that it was different people.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
From a witness on 60 minutes, BP is the one who insisted, over the objections of the drilling service company, that the well not be filled with mud before plugging it for future connection to the production rig. Apparently it would have cost them some time and a few million dollars to add and later remove the mud, but if the mud was there, the failure of the cement would not have caused a catstrophic leak.
The acoustic thing you are talking about is a switch, not an additional valve. It would have been another, redundant system alerting the failed blow out preventer that it should close (early on in the recovery process, they sent robots down and attempted to activate the blow out preventer, so it is quite clear that it failed).
I don't pretend to understand the systems well enough to know whether the acoustic switch would have activated earlier than other systems (a scenario where it may have made a difference), but I get the impression it would not have made much difference. Mostly, that impression comes from the 60 Minutes interview where one of the crew members claimed that during testing, they accidentally ran a bunch of pipe through the active part of the blow out preventer, causing an unknown amount of damage to it. They tested the system after that, but they didn't inspect it, and it isn't clear exactly how much predictive value they thought the testing had.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
You're way out of date. BP deliberately compromised the standard procedure of plugging the mud (in the pipe) to short-cut the process. There are supposed to be three plugs, BP wanted to just use two. Transocean argued against this, but BP "won the argument" because they're paying the bills. They fscked up and now we're in the mess we are now.
and then the Democratically Elected Government of Iran was removed through a coup and APOC was once again free to do as it pleased
Not a coup, operation Ajax. A CIA rifleman shot the democratically elected leader of Iran in the head during a rally. That's why they hate us.
All 3 are responsible. They can sue each other later...
The important thing is to get the leak stopped. Let the courts sort out responsibility (and liability) at their own pace.
The thing to consider, though... how do you put a price on catastrophe? These companies don't really have enough money to compensate for it -- and in reality, since when could you ever compensate with MONEY something this ridiculously catastrophic to all things biological being affected.
I think you are placing too large a value on those biological things. It's just an oil leak, not the end of the world. It's not even doing anything really serious like contaminating drinking water.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
The Atlantic surface temperatures off Africa are already higher than normal, and meteorologists are predicting the end result will be an earlier entrance of hurricanes into the Gulf of Mexico. Considering the size of the oil slick and the chance that hurricanes could be just a few months away, it looks like this hurricane season will be good and dirty.
"...And who wants to make buttprints in the sands of time?" ~Bob Moawad
do you want my email for?
sign me up to the scat lovers newsletter?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And will this near miss cause us to change our ways at all? Our politicians are blowing their usual hot air about fixing the problems that led up to this, but in the end their efforts will be no match for the billions of dollars the oil industry can supply to their campaigns, or those of their opponents. I haven't seen a single person step forward in the media and say that this situation was entirely caused by our greed and addiction to oil. No one has presented a particularly good plan for humanity as a whole to live sustainably on the only planet we know of that's habitable. If humanity wants to live, more responsible stewardship of these resources are in order.
Like one of those stories where nothing is really tied up in the end, I'm not going to get to experience the end of Humanity's story. I used to be pretty optimistic about the potential outcome back when I was younger, but now I think the end of this story will be humanity destroying itself with its own greed. The universe doesn't owe Humanity existence. No God or UFO flying alien will intercede to prevent our demise. We'll just die out, just like the dinosaurs and nature will just shrug and try again. Perhaps I'm wrong, though. Perhaps Humanity will grow up in the next century or two. I'm not holding my breath, though.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
they were building dense cities 4,000 years ago on the nile
whatever $ is lost for moving food into the city is gained and then some by everyone not needing to drive 2 hours and sit in gridlock every day just to do their business
dense cities are the norm for humanity. dense cities make sense even when all you have is sailing ships and mules. when oil goes to $15 a gallon, the cities will contract in size and normalcy will return after 50 years of cheap oil fueled insanity
meanwhile, suburban sprawl is an artificial endangered idiocy
if that "smugness" bothers you, why doesn't the traditional tea party/ republican low iq smugness and complacency about there being no problem in energy bother you?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As I understand it, evaporation drives hurricanes. With an oil slick over the gulf, maybe it will hinder evaporation and thus hinder hurricanes?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
"what would be the negative effects?"
Of a nuclear bomb? Really? Are you kidding? Ask the residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima if you honestly don't know.
I don't respond to AC's.
I think it's a little naive to ignore the fact that one hand washes the other. The accounting arm overlooks vairous shenanigans, because if they don't, then the consulting arm doesn't get as much business. The threat of pulling consulting contracts is a common technique to ensure you have "compliant" compliance auditors. I've seen it happen several times in the past 15 years. I think it's a little less common now than it used to be, though.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Naive, fair, potato, potahto:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen#Andersen_Consulting_and_Accenture
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Being far away from you, I don't care whether you get raped and devoured by a pack of horny wolves.
OK, I lied. I hope it happens.
If you have figured out how to elevate yourself above "all things biological," you might share that information with the people affected by this spill. Never mind that you are made up of basically the same things (DNA, RNA, proteins, lipids) that all other "biological things" are made up of, but I think the parent was including people (those who make their living off the ocean, live near the ocean, or consume products from these areas) in the "things biologic."
FWIW, we can't let our lifestyles cause an occasional massive kill-off of major ecological systems without it eventually coming back to bite us in the derrière.
Oh, well thank goodness Wikipedia has gotten to the bottom of this. Case closed then.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
has already started!
When the oil slick and sub-surface plumes reach the turn-back west of the British Isles and near the Greenland Sea current, the thermohaline circulation will be stopped dead, not to mention that the oxygen level of the north Atlantic will not be able to support marine life.
Way to go BP! You have found a novel way to start a new Ice Age.
"Accenture (formerly known as Anderson Consulting) did the same after Enron."
FYI, Accenture's name change from Andersen Consulting was made official in January 2001. The Enron scandal didn't become public until October 2001, and that involved Arthur Andersen not Andersen Consulting (Arthur Andersen handled Enron's accounting, Andersen Consulting had split off from them in 1989). The relationship between Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen was actually rather acrimonious despite (or perhaps because of) their similar origins.
Full disclosure: I worked for Avanade, a division of Andersen Consulting/Accenture, in 2000 right before the name change.
you're reacting to me like i'm really your parent. which was the analogy used in the above post, correct. however the idea was to actually understand the analogy, and use it for enlightenment on the source of bad opinions people have: indolent immature complacency
but instead, you start roll playing your own psychological complexes!
did you have a flashback? are you actually 14 years old? how do you feel about your mother?
"Why don't you let us do what makes sense fiscally? If I can't afford it then I can't afford it. I'm not going to become homeless just so you can feel good about yourself. You really are honest about who you are, too. You want to run all our lives, just like everyone else."
LOL! i can't read that without hearing it in the voice of a pouty valley girl. the teenage psychology is like an overwhelming stink. talk about a massive chip on an immature mind's shoulder
dude: i'm not your father. really. YOU inserted the condescending psychology, i didn't supply it. you really have issues: you can't look at the underlying concepts, you can only mentally process the issues as one of parental authoritarian force
here's an amazing fucking concept for you: maybe the issue here is PROPER ENERGY POLICY. not PARENTAL AUTHORITY
why don't you try processing the FORMER issue and leave the LATTER issue to immature low iq dimwits
pffffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How do you know setting off a nuke won't open up a fissure somewhere else that just lets the oil vent there? Plugging it up and capping it off sounds a lot less random.
Right now nuclear power plants are not economically viable without massive government subsidies. When energy becomes expensive enough, eventually nuclear power will become economically viable, but until then, there are a lot of other alternatives that can offer energy without such steep costs to the taxpayers (although still some cost).
The 75 million dollar liability cap is where my attention is focused right now.
Every single incumbent who voted for that cap should be voted out of office. This kind of accident is so damn foreseeable.
Our Congress got the American people to insure this ultrahazardous venture.
and yet they changed the name.
You can't handle the truth.
in the end, its not right versus left. the right doesn't want to fund islamic terrorism and gasbags like chavez and wants national security. the left wants a clean environment and livable cities and climate change security. its win win, there's no argument here, its beyond the traditional partisan divides. we can all agree on this one: NO OIL. GET OFF IT
our only enemies are the oil industry, entrenched corporatism warping our media and our regulations and our country's political willpower. this is why we can't fulfill the obvious natural political consensus here
before its too late, we better recognize we are junkies and see our drug dealer boyfriend for what he really is, because we're being put in a stupor and being fucked by someone who is happy to rape us and steal everything about us all the while lying to us: corporatism
corporatism is not capitalism, and is in fact a greater enemy of capitalism than socialism or communism: read your economic history of oligopolies and monopolies, morons. don't believe the corporate funded propaganda that lies to you and says they defend capitalism when they really warp the marketplace by buying off our legislators and defying our regulations and rape our environment and our national security, and leaving us polluted poor propagandized in stupid, and they run off with all the cash
before its too late, recognize the drug dealer who is raping you, and fight for your country BY GETTING OFF OIL
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's explains a lot. Of course you don't use oil to transport any of the goods(ie food) you need to live do you? Thus you still need to STFU.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
And it's not just their SUV's, those country bumpkins are wasting tons of gas with all these trucks loading who knows what type of nonsense onto them from farms and driving them towards the cities, just for fun I suspect.
Yeah, but according to 60 minutes and Rachel Maddow, BP forced Transocean to cut corners during the sealing process to get it done faster. Specifically, they relied on a pressure test to check that gasses weren't building up in the well, which should have meant that the quicker procedure was safe. Unfortunately, a gasket in the well head had failed, making the pressure test inaccurate. And they knew the gasket had failed, because pieces of it had been coming up while they were drilling. Transocean wanted to seal the well the slow, safe way, but BP forced them to do it the quick way.
Oooh, they changed their name so that people wouldn't associate them with the actions that someone else took. What a shameful thing to do.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
You make a good point, although it doesn't completely invalidate the grandparent's either (very nearly does depending on his diet). An enormous amount of energy is used transporting all of the food and supplies to dense cities, especially NYC. Much of the food has to cross hundreds of miles to reach store shelves there. One of the best ways to reduce your carbon footprint is to buy locally produced food and I simply don't see how that's even possible when you live in a dense urban area.
If you really want to have a minimal impact on the environment you would live at a smaller community where there are farmer markets and it is possible to eat everything you want with nearly all of your food produced within 20-40 miles of where you live (say at Boulder, CO). You still can get around with only a bike or by foot and still pay much less for housing and food than you would at New York City (although Boulder is considered an expensive town to live at by local standards).
The first being, obviously, political: if the US government were to seriously propose to detonate a nuke in the GOMEX, everyone from Greenpeace to your grandma would go bananas, as would the government of Mexico. You can say that politics shouldn't interfere in a decision like this if nuking is the technically correct thing to do, but... this is the real world.
The second issue is technical. You can't just drop the nuke on top of the well - the explosion would just produce a giant volume of steam (mixed with radioactive byproducts - uncool), would generate a good sized tsunami, and wouldn't necessarily even stop the flow of oil. To make this work, you'd have to emplace the bomb in a tube drilled in the ocean floor. The location, orientation, bomb size, etc, would have to be correct, and to get that right you'd need need a bunch of geological surveys, run a bunch of sims, and then drill and emplace the bomb. By the time you do all that, you could have just gone ahead with the conventional plan.
The net effect is that a nuke probably doesn't offer any real advantage over more "conventional" means of dealing with the problem, and the political and technical problems involved make it a non-starter.
In one of the many previous threads on this topic, this was brought up. It turns out (not too surprisingly) that the opportunity cost to BP of losing the remaining oil in the well is trivial compared to what they're paying in cleanup costs. Especially when you consider that they can just go a few miles away, redrill, and get to the same oilfield (it's the I drink your milkshake theory). No doubt they'd be happy to cap this thing as quickly as they could, but the nuclear option is not particularly practical.
NO they hate us by our freedom, our pizza, our women, our ipads and all that good stuff they can't have. They're just jealous.
Is my sarcasm detector broken today, or are you serious? You know, right, that the tourism and fishing industries in the Gulf are worth billions of dollars annually, and that "those biological things" are pretty critical for that piece of the economy to continue to function, right?
Here's a news flash: there are more choices for going forward than to keep doing what we're doing and live with the accompanying environmental devastation, or living in the stone age. We could begin moving to a so-called "bright green" economy today, and in addition to avoiding these fun instances of ecological Armageddon, we could 1) stop shipping money to Saudi Arabia by the supertanker-load, 2) put people to work here in the US building, installing, maintaining and operating renewable/nuclear energy and fuel-efficient equipment, 3) avoiding all kinds of air pollution, and 4) substantially mitigate the risk of global warning. We don't have to pick from "stfu" and living in a cave.
They changed the name before Enron, as the SEC was pressuring all of the major accounting firms to spin off their consulting businesses. Their position was that wanting to keep the consulting work for a company was too much of an incentive to go easy on that company's audits. Andersen was the first one to actually go along with it.
Personally, I think that incentive is still there as long as companies are allowed to hire their own auditors.
If we don't get our greenhouse gas emissions under control, it could be the end of more than humanity - the existence of multi-cellular life could be at stake. Some of the worst-case scenarios for global warming predict summertime highs in the eastern US to hit 130+ degrees within the next hundred years. The probability of that is not very high, but still - I guarantee that there is not a single vascular plant species east of the Mississippi that could survive it. It's not out of the question that we could end up producing a runaway warming effect with an end result that rivals Venus for unhospitality to life.
This is serious business. The possibility of terraforming other planets is much discussed on Slashdot. But there's a non-zero probability that we're actually "veneraforming" the earth - which would obviously have very serious consequences to those living here.
The only thing "Interesting" here is that someone actually thinks wikipedia is reliable for information on a situation that is still developing.
I've begun to think that, given how popular satire and sarcasm are used in casual conversation and in pop culture, and yet how frequently satire and sarcasm are read straight, that it's just not a good way to make a point anymore.
Sometimes, it's better to be known as humorless but sincere.
Also, I heard a bit of Rush Limbaugh claiming that since oil is a natural substance, an oil leak is not a problem. Limbaugh is an idiotic blowhard, but he has an audience, so someone must be capable of believing such absurdities.
NO, they hate us for our freedom from ethics.
From what Wikipedia says, this may not be BP's fault. Halliburton (the company famous for Iraq oil controversies including lying to the US administration) were cementing the well just a day before (by their own accounts). Transocean own the rig (renting it to BP) and their chief executive explained the cause of the incident saying, "there was a sudden, catastrophic failure of the cement, the casing or both."
It sounds like this goes all the way up to Dick Cheney. He may have personally supervised the secret demolition team that started this mess. Sorry...I got this from Wikipedia also...
Sorry if the humor wasn't broad enough. (Or, perhaps not funny enough?)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Wow, you believe that midtown Manhattan is ready for post-portable-energy society? That dense urban living can survive? What are you going to eat? Asphalt?
Oh, BP is responsible for SO MUCH MORE than that. That company used to be known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, it drilled in Iran for decades before they got rid of the Shah. In 1951, when Iran finally had a democratically elected government, which decided to follow the wishes of the people and to nationalize the Oil fields and then provide APOC with a contract, which it hated, APOC went crying to UK and US politicians, and then the Democratically Elected Government of Iran was removed through a coup and APOC was once again free to do as it pleased, it got almost the contract that it wanted, it was less though, because there was just too much pressure from the people of Iran, who I think hated the guts of APOC.
APOC renamed to BP at that time probably as a way to whitewash its image, you know: Accenture (formerly known as Anderson Consulting) did the same after Enron.
BP is a very old and I would say evil entity, what I mean is that the processes in the company are such that from the outside the results of its work look evil.
Nationalization is theft.
I'm a biologist. I actually understand what value those 'biological things' have. You are placing far too little value on those 'things'. And this is catastrophic -- whether it leads to serious detriment to mankind is unknown right now, but despite that the event is most definitely catastrophic.
I'm sorry you don't know enough to understand. Good luck with that.
Accenture (aka Andersen Consulting) is an IT consultancy. You're confusing it with Arthur Andersen, the financial consultancy that was involved with Enron. AC was forced to rebrand because Aurthur Andersen didn't like the similarity.
Why the hell hasn't Obama sent Steven Seagal in to finish all those fuckers at BP once and for all?
Not only that, but when the annular grommet was damaged, BP pushed the consequences of that under the rug. What were the consequences? The pressure testing was invalid. No wonder the cement casings failed. I don't believe in the death penalty, but in this case I'll make an exception. The chairman and CEO of BP should face the wall.
Still, the drilling company is just as much to blame. They should have told BP to stuff it. Put the CEO of that company against the wall too.
Social Credit would solve everything...
Whew! It sure is a relief to know there's nothing to worry about now from that oil leak in the gulf of mexico. Thank you for clearing this up!
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Maybe you can gzip all of the tarballs or better yet, bzip2.
Where are the giant oil tankers, floating storage bins and dredgers and super suckers to vacuum the oil?
Why isnt there a wall or fence containing the oil to a certain area while vacuuming it up?
"You really don't need a nuke to handle it, you are trying to seal the pipe, big explosions are used to snuff burning wells so you can cap them.
The ocean holds approx 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water.
The one quart is an extrapolation of some real data.
www.awma.org/enviro_edu/fact_sheets/oil_spills1.html
Which says under ideal conditions, a quart of oil may pollute up to 150,000 gallons. We had bigger spills during the gulf war then this, and due to the war clean up and dispersal efforts where not done for a long time. And the Gulf, survived, (we survived)
But if we use the 250,000 number we still have 97023809 days before the ocean is polluted, but then again the well will run out of oil way before then. And that is assuming the oil does not blow ashore which it is, it assumes that the oil does not bond and sink which much is, it assumes some does not evaporate which yes oil does, it assumed they don't use bonging agents to sink the oil, it assumes they don't use chemicals to disperse and break up the oil.
Simply put we have a long long long long long time before it will impact us to an extent other then making a few people rich, and a lot of us poorer as the fear factor drives food and fuel prices up.
But that aside the well is not 30,000 feet deep it did drill that deep of a well in the tiber field in 2009, this well was not very deep yet. It did not land on top of the well. Oddly enough when a floating vessel sinks it does not go straight down, current carry it and move it as it sinks, it is resting on the ocean floor about 1/4 mile away from the well.
All that said currently remote subs are placing a liner inside the existing pipe to seal it and pipe the crude to the surface.
Really they don't want to seal the pipe itself, as that is a huge loss as in the cost of the drilling, and then loss of the oil. I don't agree with that, the well could have been sealed on day one, if they wanted to, but they want the oil.
The internet is full of fun news sites, most of them run by people with hidden agenda's and motives, many who are just interested in having fun...
You always need to temper what you read with common sense. Verify what you read by cross referencing the references and checking the resources. Often the easiest give away is the English and grammar.
Wheres our tax payer dollars going ?
This is not hurting us but its hurting you and your families for possibly generations
There are 50 empty British tankers siting in port
They each hold millions of gallons
How about building recycling plants in the ocean or on the shore or mobile recyclers on tankers?