BP Spill: Has the damage been exaggerated?

[EVAY]

You sound even more expert than the experts quoted in the OP.

I just spent the last two weeks with a guy who has lived on the Alabama gulf coast for almost 80 years and another who has been fighting BP since this began.

I believe that they are experts, and I share their concerns.

[LnGrrrR]

You sound even more expert than the experts quoted in the OP.

Wow, I wasn't aware that every wildlife and oceanography expert was contacted for their thoughts in that article. It must have taken the author quite some time.

[admiralsnackbar]

Good news, everybody!

*****************************

By Dan Froomkin

Scientists have found signs of an oil-and-dispersant mix under the s s of tiny blue crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico, the first clear indication that the unprecedented use of dispersants in the BP oil spill has broken up the oil into toxic droplets so tiny that they can easily enter the foodchain.
Marine biologists started finding orange blobs under the translucent s s of crab larvae in May, and have continued to find them "in almost all" of the larvae they collect, all the way from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Fla. -- more than 300 miles of coastline -- said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
And now, a team of researchers from Tulane University using infrared spectrometry to determine the chemical makeup of the blobs has detected the signature for Corexit, the dispersant BP used so widely in the Deepwater Horizon
"It does appear that there is a Corexit sort of fingerprint in the blob samples that we ran," Erin Gray, a Tulane biologist, told the Huffington Post Thursday. Two independent tests are being run to confirm those findings, "so don't say that we're 100 percent sure yet," Gray said.
"The chemistry test is still not completely conclusive," said Tulane biology professor Caz Taylor, the team's leader. "But that seems the most likely thing."
With BP's well possibly capped for good, and the surface slick shrinking, some observers of the Gulf disaster are starting to let down their guard, with some journalists even asking: Where is the oil?
But the answer is clear: In part due to the1.8 million gallons of dispersant that BP used, a lot of the estimated 200 million or more gallons of oil that spewed out of the blown well remains under the surface of the Gulf in plumes of tiny toxic droplets. And it's short- and long-term effects could be profound.
BP sprayed dispersant onto the surface of the slick and into the jet of oil and gas as it erupted out of the wellhead a mile beneath the surface. As a result, less oil reached the surface and the Gulf's fragile coastline. But more remained under the surface.
Fish, shrimp and crab larvae, which float around in the open seas, are considered the most likely to die on account of exposure to the subsea oil plumes. There are fears, for instance, that an entire year's worth of bluefin tuna larvae may have perished.
But this latest discovery suggests that it's not just larvae at risk from the subsurface droplets. It's also the animals that feed on them.
"There are so many animals that eat those little larvae," said Robert J. Diaz, a marine scientist at the College of William and Mary.
Oil itself is of course toxic, especially over long exposure. But some scientists worry that the mixture of oil with dispersants will actually prove more toxic, in part because of the still not entirely understood ingredients of Corexit, and in part because of the reduction in droplet size.
"Corexit is in the water column, just as we thought, and it is entering the bodies of animals. And it's probably having a lethal impact there," said Susan Shaw, director of the Marine Environmental Research Ins ute. The dispersant, she said, is like " a delivery system" for the oil.
Although a large group of marine scientists meeting in late May reached a consensus that the application of dispersants was a legitimate element of the spill response, another group, organized by Shaw, more recently concluded "that Corexit dispersants, in combination with crude oil, pose grave health risks to marine life and human health and threaten to deplete critical niches in the Gulf food web that may never recover."
One particular concern: "The properties that facilitate the movement of dispersants through oil also make it easier for them to move through cell walls, skin barriers, and membranes that protect vital organs, underlying layers of skin, the surfaces of eyes, mouths, and other structures."
Perry told the Huffington Post that the small size of the droplets was clearly a factor in how the oil made its way under the crab larvae s s. Perry said the oil droplets in the water "are just the right size that probably in the process of swimming or respiring, they're brought into that cavity."
That would not happen if the droplets were larger, she said.
The oil droplet washes off when the larvae molt, she said -- but that's assuming they live that long. Larvae are a major food source for fish and other blue crabs -- "their siblings are their favorite meal," Perry explained. Fish are generally able to excrete ingested oil, but inverterbrates such as crabs don't have that ability.
Perry said the discovery of the oil and dispersant blobs is very troubling -- but not, she made clear, because it has any impact on the safety of seafood in the short run. "Unlike heavy metals that biomagnify as they go up the foodchain, oil doesn't seem to do that," she said. Rather, she said, "we're looking at long-term ecological effects of having this oil in contact with marine organisms."
Diaz, the marine scientist from William and Mary, spoke at a lunchtime briefing about dispersants on Capitol Hill on Thursday.
Dispersant, he explained, "doesn't make the oil go away, it just puts it from one part of the ecosystem into another."
In this case, he said, "the decision was to keep as much of the oil subsurface as possible." As a result, the immediate impact on coastal wildlife was mitigated. But the effects on ocean life, he said, are less clear -- in part because there's less known about ocean ecosystems than coastal ones.
"As we go further offshore, as the oil industry has gone offshore, we find that we know less," he said. "We haven't really been using oceanic species to assess the risks, and this is a key issue."
(Similar concerns have been expressed about the lack of important data that would allow scientists to accurately assess the effects of the spill on the Gulf's sea turtles, whose plight is emerging as particularly poignant.)

Diaz warned of the danger posed to bluefin tuna -- and also to "the signature resident species in the Gulf, the shrimp." He noted that all three species of Gulf shrimp spawn offshore before moving back into shallow estuaries.
Diaz also expressed concern that dispersed oil droplets could end up doing great damage to the Gulf's many undersea coral reefs. "If the droplets agglomerate with sediment," he said, "they could even settle to the bottom."
Nancy Kinner, co-director of the Coastal Response Center at the University of New Hampshire, said the use of dispersants in this spill raises many issues that scientists need to explore, starting with the effects of long-term exposure. She also noted that scientists have never studied the effects of dispersants when they're injected directly into the turbulence of the plume, as they were here, or at such depth, or at such low temperatures, or under such pressure.
She also said it will be essential for the federal government to accurately determine how much oil made it out of the blown well. A key data point for scientists is the ratio of dispersant to oil, she said, and "if you don't know the flow rate of the oil, you don't know what you dispersant to oil ratio is."
After a series of ludicrous estimates, the federal government settled last month on an official estimate of about 20,000 to 40,000 barrels a day, but BP is widely expected to contest that figure and some scientists think it is still a low-ball estimate.
There seems to be no doubt that history will record that the use of dispersants was good for BP, making it harder to tell how much oil was spilled, and reducing the short-term visible impact. But what's less clear is whether it will turn out to have been good for the Gulf.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0...tml?view=print

[EVAY]

Good news, everybody!

*****************************

By Dan Froomkin

Scientists have found signs of an oil-and-dispersant mix under the s s of tiny blue crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico, the first clear indication that the unprecedented use of dispersants in the BP oil spill has broken up the oil into toxic droplets so tiny that they can easily enter the foodchain.
Marine biologists started finding orange blobs under the translucent s s of crab larvae in May, and have continued to find them "in almost all" of the larvae they collect, all the way from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Fla. -- more than 300 miles of coastline -- said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
And now, a team of researchers from Tulane University using infrared spectrometry to determine the chemical makeup of the blobs has detected the signature for Corexit, the dispersant BP used so widely in the Deepwater Horizon
"It does appear that there is a Corexit sort of fingerprint in the blob samples that we ran," Erin Gray, a Tulane biologist, told the Huffington Post Thursday. Two independent tests are being run to confirm those findings, "so don't say that we're 100 percent sure yet," Gray said.
"The chemistry test is still not completely conclusive," said Tulane biology professor Caz Taylor, the team's leader. "But that seems the most likely thing."
With BP's well possibly capped for good, and the surface slick shrinking, some observers of the Gulf disaster are starting to let down their guard, with some journalists even asking: Where is the oil?
But the answer is clear: In part due to the1.8 million gallons of dispersant that BP used, a lot of the estimated 200 million or more gallons of oil that spewed out of the blown well remains under the surface of the Gulf in plumes of tiny toxic droplets. And it's short- and long-term effects could be profound.
BP sprayed dispersant onto the surface of the slick and into the jet of oil and gas as it erupted out of the wellhead a mile beneath the surface. As a result, less oil reached the surface and the Gulf's fragile coastline. But more remained under the surface.
Fish, shrimp and crab larvae, which float around in the open seas, are considered the most likely to die on account of exposure to the subsea oil plumes. There are fears, for instance, that an entire year's worth of bluefin tuna larvae may have perished.
But this latest discovery suggests that it's not just larvae at risk from the subsurface droplets. It's also the animals that feed on them.
"There are so many animals that eat those little larvae," said Robert J. Diaz, a marine scientist at the College of William and Mary.
Oil itself is of course toxic, especially over long exposure. But some scientists worry that the mixture of oil with dispersants will actually prove more toxic, in part because of the still not entirely understood ingredients of Corexit, and in part because of the reduction in droplet size.
"Corexit is in the water column, just as we thought, and it is entering the bodies of animals. And it's probably having a lethal impact there," said Susan Shaw, director of the Marine Environmental Research Ins ute. The dispersant, she said, is like " a delivery system" for the oil.
Although a large group of marine scientists meeting in late May reached a consensus that the application of dispersants was a legitimate element of the spill response, another group, organized by Shaw, more recently concluded "that Corexit dispersants, in combination with crude oil, pose grave health risks to marine life and human health and threaten to deplete critical niches in the Gulf food web that may never recover."
One particular concern: "The properties that facilitate the movement of dispersants through oil also make it easier for them to move through cell walls, skin barriers, and membranes that protect vital organs, underlying layers of skin, the surfaces of eyes, mouths, and other structures."
Perry told the Huffington Post that the small size of the droplets was clearly a factor in how the oil made its way under the crab larvae s s. Perry said the oil droplets in the water "are just the right size that probably in the process of swimming or respiring, they're brought into that cavity."
That would not happen if the droplets were larger, she said.
The oil droplet washes off when the larvae molt, she said -- but that's assuming they live that long. Larvae are a major food source for fish and other blue crabs -- "their siblings are their favorite meal," Perry explained. Fish are generally able to excrete ingested oil, but inverterbrates such as crabs don't have that ability.
Perry said the discovery of the oil and dispersant blobs is very troubling -- but not, she made clear, because it has any impact on the safety of seafood in the short run. "Unlike heavy metals that biomagnify as they go up the foodchain, oil doesn't seem to do that," she said. Rather, she said, "we're looking at long-term ecological effects of having this oil in contact with marine organisms."
Diaz, the marine scientist from William and Mary, spoke at a lunchtime briefing about dispersants on Capitol Hill on Thursday.
Dispersant, he explained, "doesn't make the oil go away, it just puts it from one part of the ecosystem into another."
In this case, he said, "the decision was to keep as much of the oil subsurface as possible." As a result, the immediate impact on coastal wildlife was mitigated. But the effects on ocean life, he said, are less clear -- in part because there's less known about ocean ecosystems than coastal ones.
"As we go further offshore, as the oil industry has gone offshore, we find that we know less," he said. "We haven't really been using oceanic species to assess the risks, and this is a key issue."
(Similar concerns have been expressed about the lack of important data that would allow scientists to accurately assess the effects of the spill on the Gulf's sea turtles, whose plight is emerging as particularly poignant.)

Diaz warned of the danger posed to bluefin tuna -- and also to "the signature resident species in the Gulf, the shrimp." He noted that all three species of Gulf shrimp spawn offshore before moving back into shallow estuaries.
Diaz also expressed concern that dispersed oil droplets could end up doing great damage to the Gulf's many undersea coral reefs. "If the droplets agglomerate with sediment," he said, "they could even settle to the bottom."
Nancy Kinner, co-director of the Coastal Response Center at the University of New Hampshire, said the use of dispersants in this spill raises many issues that scientists need to explore, starting with the effects of long-term exposure. She also noted that scientists have never studied the effects of dispersants when they're injected directly into the turbulence of the plume, as they were here, or at such depth, or at such low temperatures, or under such pressure.
She also said it will be essential for the federal government to accurately determine how much oil made it out of the blown well. A key data point for scientists is the ratio of dispersant to oil, she said, and "if you don't know the flow rate of the oil, you don't know what you dispersant to oil ratio is."
After a series of ludicrous estimates, the federal government settled last month on an official estimate of about 20,000 to 40,000 barrels a day, but BP is widely expected to contest that figure and some scientists think it is still a low-ball estimate.
There seems to be no doubt that history will record that the use of dispersants was good for BP, making it harder to tell how much oil was spilled, and reducing the short-term visible impact. But what's less clear is whether it will turn out to have been good for the Gulf.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0...tml?view=print

Admiralsnackbar:

This is just so important, man. Would you please start a thread with this article? Hidden back here under Darrin's crap lots of people won't see this, and this is exactly what many have been fearing. Maybe it won't turn out to be so bad, but this is scary as for our future health, it sems to me. Thanks.

[Ignignokt]

Evay, you're re ed. The Gulf water has bacteria that will dissolve the oil. The oil is light crude.

[TDMVPDPOY]

those machines BP bought from bill costner, are they even using them to extract the oil from the water?

[Nbadan]

The disaster has gone underwater. It has not disappeared, except perhaps from the front pages of some newspapers and magazines. The oil will still kill wildlife and soil previously pristine beaches for years to come. The time upcoming is the time that most coastal residents fear most; the time that BP will start lagging even more in its clean-up efforts because the news media wants something else to talk about; the time that the Darrins of the world run out and say "if I can't see it it must be gone".

It's not just the oil companies that need to be held accountable, but also all these M$M shills that are trying to spin this for BP.....

[admiralsnackbar]

Evay, you're re ed. The Gulf water has bacteria that will dissolve the oil. The oil is light crude.

That bacteria lives at the bottom of the ocean, but even if it did rise up for a holiday feast, something would then eat the bacteria, and that something would be eaten by something bigger until it got up to our kids' filet o'fish.

Do you honestly believe the just vanishes, man? Doug Henning spreads some magic dispersant fairy powder and whoooooo! we're done? Dude... you dump that much sewage into the ocean and it would cause problems.

[admiralsnackbar]

Admiralsnackbar:

This is just so important, man. Would you please start a thread with this article? Hidden back here under Darrin's crap lots of people won't see this, and this is exactly what many have been fearing. Maybe it won't turn out to be so bad, but this is scary as for our future health, it sems to me. Thanks.

Don't let me stop you, man -- I certainly didn't write it. Glad you understand it's significant.

[Wild Cobra]

those machines BP bought from bill costner, are they even using them to extract the oil from the water?

You can be sure that they are.

[DMX7]

Oil Spill = Solved. End of story!

[Sportcamper]

Fri Jul 30, 2:24 pm ET
Many in Gulf are outraged at reports of vanishing oil..

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot...gulf-vanishing

[Wild Cobra]

Well Camper. That article links to another that shows an edited map. Here is the original:

NASA Home/News & Features/News Topics/Looking at Earth/Features/Oil Spill/20100728_oilspill

[Winehole23]

^^^Pic is minimizing. Where's Florida? We know it got hit.

[bigzak25]

"scientific studies will be under wraps for at least three years"

And BP is corrupting every scientist it can buy to keep their findings secret.

BP will fight damages as aggressively, and very probably, as successfully as our good old American "person" Exxon did for 21 years.

boutons, why on earth would our President stand for something like this?

Is it out of his power to demand transparency with these scientific findings?

I almost want to demand that our President Obama not let this secrecy be perpetuated!

[Winehole23]

TAMPA, Fla. (Aug. 5, 2010) – Asresearchers from USF’s Coastal Research Laboratory examined miles of beaches of north Florida and Alabama last month, they discovered beaches hit by oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill and then “cleaned” by BP crews were anything but clean.

The sand, on the surface, looked better after crews had passed and was somewhat whiter, the scientists noted. But when University of South Florida beach geologist Ping Wang and researchers from his lab looked closer into the once pristine white quartz sands, they found that after beach-cleaning machines had combed the area, the beach was covered with thousands of tiny tar balls.

Furthermore, the beach cleanup efforts were doing nothing to address layers of oil buried inches below the sand and accounting for possibly more than half of the beach contamination.

“We estimate that less than 25% of the overall oil contamination, including both surficial and buried oil was cleaned,” Wang and PhD student Tiffany Roberts wrote in a report do enting the research, which was funded by the National Science Foundation.

http://usfweb3.usf.edu/absoluteNM/te.../?a=2566&z=127

[Winehole23]

"Recent reports seem to say that about 75% of the oil is taken care of and that is just not true," said John Kessler, of Texas A&M University, who led a National Science Foundation on-site study of the spill. "The fact is that 50% to 75% of the material that came out of the well is still in the water. It's just in a dissolved or dispersed form."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...e-accused-spin

[spursncowboys]

That beach looks pretty good to me. Is the tiny tar balls bad for the environment? Or is it just that they are visible to the eye? Sorry haven't really been following this story much.

[boutons_deux]

Crabs provide evidence oil tainting Gulf food web


Scientists watching Gulf of Mexico's blue crabs for evidence that oil is entering food chain

To assess how heavy a blow the BP oil spill has dealt the Gulf of Mexico, researchers are closely watching a staple of the seafood industry and primary indicator of the ecosystem's health: the blue crab.


http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0809/cra...gulf-food-web/

========

I'm sure we ain't seen nuthin yet of adulterated seafood.

[LnGrrrR]

Pftt all these damn scientists aren't REAL Americans though, are they?

[Spurminator]

Outta sight outta mind.

[DarrinS]

Crabs provide evidence oil tainting Gulf food web


Scientists watching Gulf of Mexico's blue crabs for evidence that oil is entering food chain

To assess how heavy a blow the BP oil spill has dealt the Gulf of Mexico, researchers are closely watching a staple of the seafood industry and primary indicator of the ecosystem's health: the blue crab.


http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0809/cra...gulf-food-web/

========

I'm sure we ain't seen nuthin yet of adulterated seafood.

LOL. I used to eat blue crabs out of the Houston ship channel. That water always smelled of oil.


p.s. Oil is not mercury.

[Wild Cobra]

That beach looks pretty good to me. Is the tiny tar balls bad for the environment? Or is it just that they are visible to the eye? Sorry haven't really been following this story much.

Tiny tarballs are natural in that region without oil spills!

[Winehole23]

Link?

[Winehole23]

USF says government tried to squelch their oil plume findings

By Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Tuesday, August 10, 2010

A month after the Deepwater Horizon disaster began, scientists from the University of South Florida made a startling announcement. They had found signs that the oil spewing from the well had formed a 6-mile-wide plume snaking along in the deepest recesses of the gulf.



The reaction that USF announcement received from the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agencies that sponsored their research:



Shut up.


"I got lambasted by the Coast Guard and NOAA when we said there was undersea oil," USF marine sciences dean William Hogarth said. Some officials even told him to retract USF's public announcement, he said, comparing it to being "beat up" by federal officials.


The USF scientists weren't alone. Vernon Asper, an oceanographer at the University of Southern Mississippi, was part of a similar effort that met with a similar reaction. "We expected that NOAA would be pleased because we found something very, very interesting," Asper said. "NOAA instead responded by trying to discredit us. It was just a shock to us."


NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, in comments she made to reporters in May, expressed strong skepticism about the existence of undersea oil plumes — as did BP's then-CEO, Tony Hayward.


"She basically called us inept idiots," Asper said. "We took that very personally."
Lubchenco confirmed Monday that her agency told USF and other academic ins utions involved in the study of undersea plumes that they should hold off talking so openly about it. "What we asked for, was for people to stop speculating before they had a chance to analyze what they were finding," Lubchenco said. "We think that's in everybody's interest. … We just wanted to try to make sure that we knew something before we speculated about it."


"We had solid evidence, rock solid," Asper said. "We weren't speculating." If he had to do it over again, he said, he'd do it all exactly the same way, despite Lubchenco's ire.
Coast Guard officials did not respond to a request for comment on Hogarth's accusation.


The discovery of multiple undersea plumes of oil droplets was eventually verified by one of NOAA's own research vessels. And last month USF scientists announced they at last could match the oil droplets in the undersea plumes to the millions of barrels of oil that gushed from the collapsed well until it was capped July 15.


"What we have learned completely changes the idea of what an oil spill is," USF scientist David Hollander said then. "It has gone from a two-dimensional disaster to a three-dimensional catastrophe."

Read more...