Slashdot Mirror
New Oil Slick In Gulf Waters Linked To BP Well
An anonymous reader writes "A new oil sheen appeared in the Gulf of Mexico last week, and now scientists have confirmed that the oil bubbling up to the surface matches the type released by BP's Deepwater Horizon oil well last summer. Ed Overton, a chemist at Louisiana State University, examined samples of the oil and said, 'After examining the data, I think it's a dead ringer for the MC252 oil, as good a match as I've seen. My guess is that it is probably coming from the broken riser pipe or sunken platform.'"
First, the scientist himself said it looked like, but was not oil from the BP well. That's what "dead ringer" means. Then, he said he wasn't sure it was it, but that he "guessed" it was "probably" it. That is not a definitive statement. Neither is. If he was sure, he would state that "This is oil from the BP well." But, he did not say that. He used speculative language because he has no proof.
He said it was the "best match he'd seen," but that says nothing about how much of a match it was. If every other sample was a 0.1% match and this was a 0.2% match, then it's the "best match seen," but still not much of a match.
The "dead ringer" description does imply that the absolute match could be quite good, but then "dead ringer" is also a subjective description rather than an objective one.
The bottom line is that they still need to prove that this is oil from the same hole that was plugged. That has not been proven yet.