Slashdot Mirror
Quantifying, and Dealing With, the Deepwater Spill
Gooseygoose writes with a link to this analysis by Boston University professor Cutler Cleveland. "Some reports in the media attempt to downplay the significance of the release of oil from the Deepwater Horizon accident by arguing that natural oil seeps release large volumes of oil to the ocean, so why worry? Let's look at the numbers." Read on for a few more stories on the topic of the Deepwater Horizon spill.
theodp writes with some information on the remote-controlled efforts to stanch the oil's flow: "The work Tito Collasius does sounds a little like science fiction: Men on ships flicking joysticks that control robots the size of trucks as they rove miles beneath the sea in near-freezing depths no man could hope to reach. But BP's spill efforts rest in the hands of underwater remote-operated vehicle (ROV) pilots, who 'fly' the ROVs from command centers aboard ships, joysticks in hand and large banks of screens in front of them offering a view of the challenges they confront in the waters below. ROVs are typically used for commercial (as in the oil industry), oceanographic (science research and exploration), and military (mine reconnaissance and recovery) missions. If you're interested in joining Tito, training's available."
Even if BP were to effect a perfect block for the oil, though, there's still quite a bit of it swirling in the Gulf — you've probably seen some gut-wrenching pictures of the affected wildlife. Reader grrlscientist writes "Some people claim that we should euthanize all oiled birds immediately upon recovering them. But I argue it is our ethical responsibility to protect, clean, and save these birds, even after they've been oiled, just as we should preserve and clean their habitats."
See? The oil spill is all natural. Nothing to see here, folks. The catastrophe was all in your minds. You can go back to driving SUVs, voting Republican, and burning rubber tires for fun again.
Reader grrlscientist writes...it is our ethical responsibility to protect, clean and save these birds, even after they've been oiled, just as we should preserve and clean their habitats
I love it. The BP executives should themselves be forced to help clean birds and other wildlife. It's the grown-up equivalent of writing "I will not pollute the ocean" ten million times on the blackboard.
Slashdotters are better than the general public at understanding that this BP rupture's quantity of spewing oil is very serious and damaging, even where it isn't obvious on Gulf Coast beaches.
So you should look at who is downplaying it. And then remember next time they tell you something how seriously low their credibility is. That they cannot be trusted. Their usual lying isn't usually as obvious as it is here.
--
make install -not war
Take a look at the site of the Exon spill in Alaska. Although it has been about 30 years the beaches are still a total wreck and the area still can not be fished.
Coral reefs may be the worst injuries as they kill easily and may take hundreds of years to rekindle. It is obvious that financially damaged parties will continue to be damaged for decades.
And the large view is even worse. Human population is exploding and we are now absolutely confronted with the fact that oil driven technologies are a horror story. And we are jumping to adopt newer technologies with no way to estimate the great harm that they may generate. After all, only the lunatic fringe believed that oil driven advances were aproblem until the 1970 era.
People are cruel, shallow, and small minded.
All of us are some of the time.
All a misanthrope needs to do is sit back with a beer and watch humanity destroy themselves with their shallowness and stupidity.
Stupidity often burns me out too, but if we just sit back and do nothing we will run out of beer (and food, and clean air, etc.) and suffer greatly long before the end. So heave a sigh, shed a bitter tear, and roll up your sleeves for another tortuous round of cleanup and rebuild.
from long dead organisms
You answered your own question. If you don't believe the answer the geologists give you, feel free to read up on petroleum geology, and do some basic back-of-the-envelope calculations yourself.
There are four ways to answer a question. From best to worst:
1) Figure it out yourself
2) Trust the experts
3) Proclaim it an unanswerable mystery
4) Make up something
You're one rung off the bottom. Climb on up!
Isn't it obvious? The Gulf of Mexico is the site of an ancient volcano (roughly 75 million years old) where billions of organisms were deposited from spacecraft strongly resembling DC-8's, then nuked from orbit.
OK, all you armchair generals and Monday morning drilling engineers:
Before you post your wonderfully insightful method for stopping the spill, read up on the several thousand other suggestions here.
The rest of you just read the various threads anyway. More signal to noise than anything I've seen so far. Even think of donating to help the servers keep afloat.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Millions of years of dead plant and animal life, plus shifting tectonic plates (and ever-changing coastlines), can give rise to vast undersea reservoirs of oil. Even the oil industry geologists know it: how do you think they find these reservoirs?
But we all see what you're trying to do there. Hmm, maybe oil isn't from dead plant life after all! Maybe it occurs naturally in the Earth's crust, where God put it! Gosh, maybe there's a practically infinite supply! Maybe it's even naturally renewed! Why, that would mean that all this talk about needing to find alternate energy sources is just a load of hooey! Ha ha, those environmentalist whackos sure are stupid, just like Rush said!"
It's a story being advanced by people who either (1) have a vested interest in the continued profits of oil companies, (2) refuse to believe that the earth is more than 6000 years old, or (3) have a political axe to grind against environmentalists.
And at this point, I've pretty much lost my patience with all of those camps.
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
Seems like there's far more oil than can be accounted for by dead organisms alone.
The total global biomass has been estimated to be 2000 billion tonnes with 1600 billion of those tonnes in forests.[13][14]
Net primary production is the rate at which biomass is generated in a given area, mainly due to photosynthesis. Some global producers of biomass in order of productivity rates are
* swamps and marshes: 2,500 g/m/yr of biomass[15]
* tropical rain forests: 2,000 g/m/yr of biomass[16]
* algal beds and reefs: 2000 g/m/yr of biomass[15]
* river estuaries: 1,800 g/m/yr of biomass[15]
* temperate forests: 1,250 g/m/yr of biomass[15]
* cultivated lands: 650 g/m/yr of biomass[15][17]
* deserts: 3 g/m/yr of biomass[17]
* open ocean: 125 g/m/yr of biomass[15][17]
* tundras: 140 g/m/yr[15][17]
(Multiply by millions of years...)
You can't take the sky from me...
My understanding is that a rubber bushing essential to the operation of the BOP was damaged a few days before during a test of it (or something related) and this damage contributed to the massive failure of the BOP.
BP has been providing live feeds of all the ROV missions to the wellhead for the last few days. For those who are curious, here's a pretty decent site hosting all the feeds from the ROVs. Pretty fascinating to watch all the work going on around the BOP, occasionally you can follow a few of the ROVs as they wander off to find old pipelines or prepare the Q4000 direct connection. In a tragic way it almost feels like watching the Titanic discovery all over again.
Believe it or not, I actually used to receive lots of mod points back in the day when I meta-modded(correctly) everyday, made every post a high-scoring one, and didn't post anything offensive.
Then CmdrTaco posted something like "testing, testing" in the seemingly redundant beta.slashdot.org introductory discussion. When I saw that he was already modded "troll", I followed suit and modded him troll for laughs. For mysterious reasons, the discussion no longer exists.
I never got mod points after that.
you won't have nuclear reactors with modern technology. france and japan have been relying on reactors for decades. but not in your backyard, no. you know, electric cars, less air pollution, no more funding of geopolitical nightmares, etc.
so instead you'll have thousands of acres of your shoreline turned into a befouled environmental calamity, you'll fund wahhabi madrasas in pakistan through all the money you're giving saudis to drive your SUVs, you'll send your sons, daughters, fathers, mothers to die in pointless wars, you'll fuel global warming, you'll make your cities unbreathable...
but remember, its nuclear power we should be afraid of
read NIMBY's, and reverse your idiotic mental block:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
While Palin's pretty shamelessly rent-seeking (drill in Alaska? why, how convenient!) the idea that we've been avoiding one ecologically sensitive area (pristine Alaska wilderness) in favor of drilling in another, potentially more sensitive area which is also much much riskier to drill in (the Gulf) for whatever reason (perhaps it's easier for people to conceive of the former as wilderness-y?)... that part of her idea is not without merit. Regardless of our ultimate course of action, we should be sure that we are weighing the potential environmental impact a bit more dispassionately, and with an eye to overall impact - including the impact of the risks, so elusive and difficult to grasp until disaster strikes.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Don't try and blow it up it may never burn out, like this fire that has been burning for 35+ years: The Door to Hell
Hint #1: Oil/NG needs oxygen to burn.
Hint #2: There is a serious lack of free oxygen 5,000 ft underwater.
I'm pretty sure we don't have to worry about an underwater wellhead catching fire and never burning out.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
mostly out of favor nowadays
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
A University of Illinois research team is working on turning pig manure into a form of crude oil that could be refined to heat homes or generate electricity... Years of research and fine-tuning are ahead before the idea could be commercially viable -MSNBC
circumstantial evidence strongly favors a [biogenic] origin for almost all found to date. -The Straight Dope
Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water, and moderate amounts of heat. -WorldNetDaily
Skeptics say that while traces of abiotic hydrocarbons may exist, little data support the idea of economically meaningful deposits. "Companies have been looking for oil for 100 years. If all this abiogenic stuff is there, why haven't they found it?" asks geochemist Geoffrey Glasby, who spent nine months investigating the matter for a 2006 review paper in Resource Geology. He concluded the totality of the evidence did not support the concept. -Forbes (my link)
You may want to read the articles before you cite them.
PS: WorldNetDaily? Really? What's next, Mad Magazine and Star?