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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."
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 This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.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'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?
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"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/
Look at the bright side. Now the satellite imagery of the loop current will be much easier to read with the oil tracer.
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
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.
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."
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
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
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.
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
No, we don't need to get used to your smugness.
We'll just cut off your fucking food supply.
Grow food on the roof of your highrise. You should be able to produce enough to support about 10% of the people in your building.
Here's a shovel you can use. To grow food, and later, to fight for it.
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.
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.
Without oil-based fertilizer, pesticides and oil-powered farm equipment no real decision needs to be made about who is going to starve - approximately 90% of the current population will starve. The crops that are grown can't be transported to markets either.
If you live in a city, you are pretty much doomed should this come to pass. The cities without food are simply deathtraps. Worse, before you actually starve you will either be swept up into a gang searching for the last few scraps or killed by such a gang.
The only people that will survive are those in suburban and rural locations with arable land. If you can't grow a garden and keep chickens you are going to be in big trouble. No, I don't think a barter system will quickly evolve. I expect a lot of people to be standing around waiting for the government to "do something" only to be very, very disappointed.
I think the electricity will be the first to go - we haven't built a power plant in 40 years of any real capacity and we are unlikely to really "conserve" our way out of needing more and more. Electric cars might just be the load that pushes the grid down - there is no way that we could support having cars plugged in during the day or until around 9PM in most of the US. So I would expect the grid to collapse within the next couple of years. No electricity means no gasoline pumps, so you can't fill up your gas-powered car either. Without transportation, the cities start to die from panic, lack of food and violence.