Huge Amounts of Oil Found On Gulf of Mexico Floor

intellitech tips news of a study examining the Gulf of Mexico sea floor in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Marine scientists have found a thick layer of oil, and say it has devastated life there. "Studies using a submersible found a layer, as much as 10cm thick in places, of dead animals and oil, said Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia. Knocking these animals out of the food chain will, in time, affect species relevant to fisheries. She disputed an assessment by BP's compensation fund that the Gulf of Mexico will recover by the end of 2012. ... 'The impact on the benthos was devastating,' she told BBC News. 'Filter-feeding organisms, invertebrate worms, corals, sea fans — all of those were substantially impacted — and by impacted, I mean essentially killed. Another critical point is that detrital feeders like sea cucumbers, brittle stars that wander around the bottom, I didn't see a living (sea cucumber) around on any of the wellhead dives. They're typically everywhere, and we saw none.'"

Comments

It's ridiculous.

[Rossman]

And this is the problem with allowing big business to violate the environment. No matter how much they can assure us nothing will go wrong, something generally does go wrong and then we're screwed. Sure we "fined them" and "made them pay for the cleanup" but still the ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico got badly damaged and will take a long time to recover (2012 my ass - shit, there is still oil on beaches in Alaska from the Valdez spill, that happened decades ago).

When will we learn that there are some risks we just shouldn't take.

Re:It's ridiculous.

[Cougem]

Some risks we just shouldn't take? What risks? Drilling for oil? Come on, give us a break, if we didn't harvest fossil fuels civilisation would be far less advanced than we are now. I acknowledge BP messed up and oil companies are generally assholes, but don't pretend America would be better off without them.

Re:It's ridiculous.

[hsthompson69]

Mod parent up. If the cost is the occasional environmental disaster, and the benefit is modern civilization that can support the food and energy needs of a growing population, thank you very much, but I'll choose modern civilization.

More people have died in the past 30 years because of a lack of cheap energy than from any environmental disaster caused by the petroleum industry.

Re:It's ridiculous.

[hawguy]

Come on, give us a break, if we didn't harvest fossil fuels civilisation would be far less advanced than we are now

Or, perhaps if we didn't drill for oil in high risk places, we'd be much farther along with alternatives to oil (including nuclear) and we wouldn't feel that we *have* to drill in water a mile deep.

Re:It's ridiculous.

[unity100]

yea. civilization would be FAR less advanced than we are now, like .... aaah, how, exactly ? as in electrical energy ? or solar ?

which, we are trying to make a transition to, at this time and age, a whole 100 years late ?

as long as there are people who are buying bullshit, like you, these kind of thing does not end.

Re:It's ridiculous.

[bsane]

Depends on your definition of better. Some of us would prefer a simpler lifestyle.

Nothing is stopping you. Now- how about you stop trying to make me live a simpler lifestyle?

Re:It's ridiculous.

[h4rr4r]

False dichotomy. No reason we could not drill on land, use nuclear power, or any number of things that would have prevented this. Hell, we could just require the proper safety measures be used and hang the CEO if they fail to do that. I bet a couple Execs with broken necks would sort this shit right out.

Re:It's ridiculous.

[dogmatixpsych]

And who's to blame for killing alternatives in the 70s? Mainly the radical environmental groups. I'm not saying they are solely to blame but some of our heavy dependence on fossil fuels today is because of them.

Re:It's ridiculous.

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

The modern farming and plastics industries wouldn't work without petrochemicals. There's a good chance modern medicine wouldn't work either, whether due to direct dependencies such as medicines derived from petrochemicals or indirect dependencies such as plastics used to manufacture medical implements, fuels used to transport the injured, etc. Worse medicine directly equals reduced economic output (more people sicker longer) and greater hardship (more people dead earlier), as well as increased opportunity losses (more geniuses sick or dead - look up Ramanujan some time).

Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.

Re:It's ridiculous.

[CodeBuster]

It's not bull. The life that you now enjoy would have been practically unimaginable to someone living in the 19th century, before the advent of cheap carbon energy and the invention of internal combustion. I don't know about you, but modern transportation, the green revolution (cheap and abundant food) and antibiotics, to name just a few of the advances enabled by hydrocarbons, are nothing to be sneezed at. Solar and wind energy cannot yet replace our energy needs, not even close. Even if we squeeze every last efficiency gain that we can reasonably get, it still won't be enough. Like it or not, fossil fuels are going to be with us for a while longer and most probably until they are completely used up; they're just aren't good enough substitutes in many applications yet.

Re:It's ridiculous.

[c6gunner]

Yep, because you don't need to use energy to make solar cells - they just fall out of the sky. And because industrial grade smelters can run off a couple calculators daisy-chained together. And lithium is an inexhaustible resource.

Solar isn't even a solution TODAY. If you honestly think we could have transitioned to it 100 years ago, you are completely ignorant of what's involved. The only reason we can even CONSIDER it now is because of the relatively cheap energy which we've been ripping out of the ground for the last century.

Re:It's ridiculous.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I always love these people who put down our modern life and how uninformed and uncritical they are (in the sense of being unable to critically examine their own values). If you stood up your average college class and told thme how many would be dead of diseases common a hundred years ago, all they would say is, "well yeah, medicine is good." They are never able to recognize on their own that it took the entire richness of our culture to be able to support enough researchers to discover, make, disseminate, teach, and practice these medical discoveries. No gasoline=no cars=no roads=no (or very, very slow) ambulances. Reduced energy supply=reduced energy use=more expensive food, housing, ...everything= less industry=less research=shorter lives (even shorter than they are with the effects of pollution figured in.

Re:It's ridiculous.

[Graff]

we'd be much farther along with alternatives to oil (including nuclear)

We'd be much further with nuclear if the environmentalists had gotten their heads out of their asses decades ago and stopped getting in the way of nuclear research and nuclear power development. Only now that the situation is starting to get desperate are they saying "oops, my bad". They still won't admit they were needlessly fear-mongering for years.

win win!

[Charliemopps]

Now all the wildlife is perfectly preserved for future generations to study after we've finished killing them all off. Oil companies are always thinking of our children.

No one's surprised.

[khasim]

Just waiting to see what kind of fines BP will have to pay to help clean up that mess.

And if you're going to say that they'll just pass the fines on to their customers ... who cares? If their prices are higher than their competition then I'll shop at their competition.

Re:No one's surprised.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If the politics of extraction industries in America's south-eastern coal producing regions are anything to go by, the theoretical damages will be very high indeed; but buying enough of the government to get it off their backs will be quite modestly priced. There will be 10-20 years of litigation, the fines that actually survive the appeals process will be approximately equal to those assessed for downloading a couple of dozen mp3s, and assorted slimy politicians will go on at considerable length about how any fines at all are "job killing", "anti-business", and "play right into OPEC's agenda"...

Re:No one's surprised.

[EdIII]

Extortion?

Way to troll. The damage to the environment and the economy of the coastal cities that depend on the ocean will be severely impacted for decades. Not 2 years, *decades*. I am not surprised at all by this. Do you think the oil is just going to disappear? What about all that chemical crap they were pumping out too?

No way I am eating seafood from the Gulf.

BP deserves to be DESTROYED over this. Total Destruction. The US needs to seize any and all assets of BP that they can, ban them from doing business with the US, keep them out of the Gulf and away from the Atlantic due to the clear threat they pose to the US, and put all seized assets into a relief fund that the coastal cities and states can draw on for the next few decades.

Extortion? That's comical. They are getting off easy so far.

Re:No one's surprised.

[TFAFalcon]

No, that would be an over-reaction. We don't yet know for certain what the damage will turn out to be. So why not just suspend the rights of BS stockholders and put the company under the temporary control of the US government until all of the damage from the spill is repaired. Absolutely all of the corporation's profit should be used to combat the damage, and all executive bonuses should go into the same fund as well.

Another good step would be to order the executives to keep working in the corporation of face criminal charges. Let them take at least some of the punishment, not just the stockholders.

In time (years, decades, centuries), when the situation returns to normal, the old stockholders or there descendants can have the company back, if there is anything left of it.

Punishment like that would make stockholders and executives at least a bit more likely to avoid accidents, rather then just hope they don't happen, then take the golden parachute if they do.

Re:No one's surprised.

[peragrin]

That''s not how the oil market works.

BP will raise their rates, everyone else will quickly realize they can get more out of the consumers, and raise to match but keep the profits.

when dealing with cartels always think the worst.

Right next to the wellhead, what do you expect

[magarity]

"I didn't see a living (sea cucumber) around on any of the wellhead dives"
 
I'd like to see a larger survey, please. Of course right next to where the well broke there will be a significant problem with marine life. Please examine what exactly is the area impacted.

Re:Obama must be the 2nd Teflon President

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that when a Democrat is in office, Republicans always say things like this, and when a Republican is in office, Democrats always say things like this? Is it because you're both idiots?

Re:Not a big shocker there

[MightyMartian]

Don't worry, my friend. This is America. In America, scientists are tolerated only so long as they tow the party line. When science diverges from short term commercial interests, you can be sure that scientists cannot be trusted, that scientists are Communists, anti-God and anti-American Way. Your child like faith does you great credit, and will server you well when Sarah Palin is chosen to be the next President and all those pinko environmental laws are thrown out the window and any scientist who believes that the Earth is over six thousand years old or that large amounts of oil vomiting on to the floor of the Gulf of Mexico will be re-educated in their proper patriotic requirements.

God bless America, where freedom is slavery, ignorance is knowledge and war is peace.

Good luck with that

[rsilvergun]

BP will keep any compensation claims in court until a more favorable (READ: Republican) administration is in office to sweep the whole thing away (note I said away, it's already been swept under the rug, or the ocean as it were). If you don't like it, stop voting Republican. Jeez, they've come out & publicly said they want to dismantle the EPA...

Re:Good luck with that

[h4rr4r]

Sounds just like the DEA, they ban drugs all by themselves. Seems the republicans like that one just fine though.

Re:Good luck with that

[ShakaUVM]

BP will keep any compensation claims in court until a more favorable (READ: Republican) administration is in office to sweep the whole thing away (note I said away, it's already been swept under the rug, or the ocean as it were). If you don't like it, stop voting Republican. Jeez, they've come out & publicly said they want to dismantle the EPA...

To be fair, the way our environmental law works in America right now, EPA included, is horribly flawed.

Its original mission was to stop the kinds of stuff that *everyone*, right- and left-wing both, can agree is bad: dumping waste into public water systems, belching smoke next to a school, and so forth.

The modern environmentalist movement has moved on from there to basically banning any and all projects, everywhere, if it impacts the environment in the slightest. Some ripe examples of environmentalist hypocrisy:
1) Building a wind farm in upstate Virginia? Some lawyers who owned a vacation farm there (and had *fought* NIMBYs before for companies) sued and got construction blocked.
2) Building an offshore wind farm? Teddy Kennedy,Mr. 90% voting rating by environmental groups, sues to have it blocked.
3) Building a massive solar project in the Mojave desert? Sierra Club sues to have it blocked.
4) Building a new interstate in North Carolina? 10 river snails found in a new branch of a river mean the project has to be rerouted at a cost of billions of dollars and with X tons of extra pollution going into the atmosphere every day from all the extra car-miles being driven, let alone the extra time on the commute.
5) The California High Speed Rail system, which has the support of environmentalists, is currently slogging through its three year and multibillion dollar environmental impact report. They've already been threatened to be sued by environmentalists for going through Pacheco Pass. (And if they went through Altamont? They'd be sued, too.)

Etc., etc.

The arguments always made by these duplicitous bastards is that, "Well, we aren't against X (Wind power, solar, etc.), we're just against it here." And if the place isn't 100% perfect, the judge will agree, and it'll get moved elsewhere, at which point the project gets sued again, and it gets delayed and moved again, and so forth.

One editor put it exceptionally well: You look at all of these developments that environmentalists love - canal walks by DC, highways leading to trail heads in the Sierras, and so forth. And then you realize that all of these things would be impossible to build today. We're so screwed up in our modern society that we could never do another Erie Canal, or a Hoover Dam, or the Interstate System. It's impossible.

So something needs to change. I wouldn't say that banning the EPA is the right way of going about it, but limiting and restricting the EPA to deal simply with actual sources of pollution, would be a very good thing. So they would no longer be an unelected and unaccountable limiter on construction in the US. Revising the Endangered Species Act to eliminate its abuses would be an excellent accompaniment.

More importantly though, we need reform for environmental lawsuits. Perhaps for every major project, a tribunal of judges could be set up to hold all hearings in a unified and systemic fashion. So lawsuits can no longer bounce projects around the countryside, and so that projects no longer require themselves to be perfect to be allowed to go forward, but merely the best option among several choices. And their default behavior should be to allow the project to proceed.

No data or links to scientific articles

[the eric conspiracy]

How is anyone supposed to make an assessment of this story? There is no data presented, no links to scientific articles, and the quotation referenced 'around the wellhead' where of course you would expect severe effects.

I realize this is Slashdot, but surely there has to be a minimal standard for reporting on a technical site.

Re:No data or links to scientific articles

[rta]

This article doesn't pass the smell test for a few reasons.

a) Everything i've heard so far about the dissolved methane has been pretty positive. e.g. http://www.upstreamonline.com/incoming/article240856.ece
The current article doesn't make anything but a FUD statement that the methane is "a big deal".

b) Having watched live video feeds (for hundreds of hours (Go CRAW! )) from the well area during the capping process two things don't jive: First of all the area immediately around the well, say within 200m or so didn't have anything living on it. It was just mud. Occasionally (maybe once a day at most ) a fish , squid or shark would swim by, but that's it. No crabs, sea cucumbers, corals or anything else were on the bottom. This is probably because it was all at 5000 ft depth where there's no light and not a whole heck of a lot going on. Second, even around the well there was no actual oil visible.

c) I'm glad they took samples over "2600 square miles". What percentage of the area was impacted ? where ? over such a huge area even if all the oil had sunk straight to the bottom it would be a vanishingly small amount. certainly not enough to "choke off" anything. Also, as noted in point "b" the corals and sea stars etc would have to be some distance away from the well anyway because coral needs sunlight... which doesn't exist 1 mile down.

d) there's no mention of just how many natural oil and gas seeps there are in the GOM. (answer: thousands). Let's wait and see if those samples really show that the oil is from the mc 252 well.

i fully believe that some of the oil ended up on the bottom and that it's caused damage, but on the balance whatever truth there may be in this article is being spun in a misleading and scare-mongering way. The GOM is open for shrimping and the shrimp is testing out fine.

deep water is cold

[lotho brandybuck]

Under 1000ft, seawater is usually under 4C. All the processes and critters that break down the oil work much slower in the cold. A lot of that area will probably remain dead until more silt falls over it and its recolonized from scratch. This is sad, but I doubt it was unexpected by anyone who knew anything.

Re:Not a big shocker there

[sycodon]

615,000 square miles of ocean floor in the Gulf.

How big of an area did they examine? Did they really expect to find anything different around the well head?

So she goes and examines in detail maybe half a square mile right around "ground zero" and extrapolates that to 615,000 square miles?

OK... I see.

Got your priorities in order...

[Tetsujin]

"Knocking these animals out of the food chain will, in time, affect species relevant to fisheries."

Gotta love that.
"Hey, turns out we've devastated the local environment!"
"Why should I care?"
"But whole species could die, or be pushed to the brink of extinction!"
"Meh."
"Well... fishermen could lose their jobs!"
"Oh, that is a big deal! They'd better get right on that."
"Hm, how can I put this... You'll have to pay more for fish, and Your Tax Dollars* will have to be used to solve the problem!"
"TO ACTION!"

(* Your Tax Dollars are not actually yours.)

Re:"Huge Amounts of Oil Found On Gulf of Mexico Fl

[The Spoonman]

the people who are supposed to check on oil rigs and make sure nothing bad happens are absolutely incompetent

Well, that's not entirely true. They're actually quite competent...they just work for the oil companies and thus their opinions are drowned out by the "cha-ching" sound the executives eyes make. GW made absolutely sure there was no one who would slow down an oil operation anywhere in the gubment. And, yes, the spineless coward Dems aren't any better. Time to stop throwing our votes away on the two major parties!

Re:"Huge Amounts of Oil Found On Gulf of Mexico Fl

[burnin1965]

Two judges have ruled it to be Unconstitutional so far and it is making its way up to the Supreme Court for review.

People have their biases and they like to seek out information and sources that confirm rather than challenge their assertions and assumptions... those on the left whom limit themselves to only "friendly" sources, plus those that do seek out "enemy" sources but dismiss everything the opposition has to say anyway, might have had a hard time finding coherent arguments to why ObamaCare wasn't a good thing, well, other than the far left that cried that ObamaCare just didn't go far enough.

You seem to have missed the truth that 2 judges have ruled that the federal health care reform law in unconstitutional while 2 have ruled that it is constitutional. As a U.S. citizen who is looking forward to the Supreme Court striking down a law that forces citizens to buy over priced insurance policies from corrupt scum bag corporations I can also see that a single payer system would be good for the welfare of the entire nation, from individual citizens to all corporations excluding the scum bags currently ripping off citizens.

So I have to ask, that super Koolaid you are drinking that blinds you from reality, is it a bum trip or a super high cause I wouldn't want a bum trip but if the fantasy world your living in is any fun perhaps it would be worthwhile to take a sip.

Re:"Huge Amounts of Oil Found On Gulf of Mexico Fl

[Glock27]

Yeah... drill baby drill. Oh, hang on...

Drill baby drill! We need a sane energy policy or our already struggling economy will take another dive soon. Things aren't looking at all good given the unrest in the Middle East right now.

More drilling sounds like a plan to me as long as basic safety procedures are followed. It took multiple violations for this well to fail. Thousands of rigs have operated there for many years with no problems. After Deepwater Horizon I'm sure all of the companies involved realize there's no net cost savings in skimping on safety.

On a more scientific note, I notice there's absolutely no quantitative information in the linked article. Exactly how much of the 615,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico seafloor was affected? I'm guessing it was far less than 1%, but of course that wouldn't sound nearly so alarming...

According to Wikipedia, about 5 million barrels of oil were released into the Gulf, at 42 gallons per barrel for 210,000,000 gallons. Also according to Wikipedia, the total amount of water in the Gulf is 660 quadrillion gallons (6.6e15 gallons). So the oil released represented about 0.0000003% of the total volume of the seawater. If you released the same percentage of oil into a full standard bathtub (36 gallons) you'd be releasing about 0.0004 grams of oil...not even close to a single drop. Also reflect on the fact that around half the oil evaporated quite soon after the spill.

This is not to say such spills are negligible, but I hope the numbers put things into a bit more of a perspective. Newspapers sell (and websites get hit) based on how alarming the story sounds...