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It's the first payment of a 4 year installment plan and it was paid early.
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/17...-floor/?hpt=T2
Scientists: Toxic organisms, oil found on Gulf floor
John Paul says, at first, he couldn't believe his own scientific data showing toxic microscopic marine organisms in the Gulf of Mexico. He repeated the field test. A colleague did his own test. All the results came back the same: toxic.
It was the first time Paul and other University of South Florida scientists had made such a finding since they started investigating the environmental damage from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The preliminary results, the scientists believe, show that oil that has settled on the floor is contaminating small sea organisms.
Paul is a marine microbiologist with the University of South Florida. He and 13 other researchers were in the middle of a 10-day research mission that began August 6 in the Gulf of Mexico when they made the toxic discovery.
The researchers battled 12-foot waves and storms but returned to St. Petersburg, Florida Monday night.
We were there as the team pulled its research materials into the lab and got the first report back of their initial findings.
The researchers found micro-droplets of oil scattered across the ocean floor and they also found those droplets moving up through a part of the Gulf called the DeSoto Canyon, a channel which funnels water and nutrients into the popular commercial and recreational waters along the Florida Gulf Coast.
The scientists say even though it's getting harder to see the oil the Gulf is still not safe.
"This whole concept of submerged oil and the application of dispersants in the subsurface and what are the impacts that it could have, have changed the paradigm of what an oil spill is from a 2-dimensional surface disaster to a 3-dimensional catastrophe," said David Hollander, a chemical oceanographer and one of the lead scientists on the recent USF mission.
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Looks to me like we still have a rather serious situation in the Gulf.
It's the first payment of a 4 year installment plan and it was paid early.
It would seem that Texas has mostly been spared the ill effects so far. Let's hope it stays that way.
The European model is to raise the oil to the surface and skim off as much as possible. They're a bit puzzled by the use of dispersants to sink the oil instead.
Has the possible impact of that even been studied yet?
If not we would seem to have a learning opportunity now.
More like Slick Willie than Gertrude Stein for sure.
I love how you continually run away from your own posts: " a data point among data points."
Don't you see the banner you wrote?
75% of oil "gone?"
From Oil Spill to Oil Dump: The Dirty Secret of BP’s Clean-Up
Posted by Green For All on @ 11:54 am
Article printed from speakeasy: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy
By Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green For All
When oil was steadily gushing out of BP’s broken oil pipeline into the Gulf of Mexico, we were all desperate to stop the flow and get the oil that had already spilled safely out of the water. Sadly, we paid too little attention to where that oil would go once clean-up workers removed it from the Gulf waters. Now we know: far too much of it is being dumped in communities of color.
Robert D. Bullard, Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, wrote last week that 61% the waste from the BP clean-up (more than 24,000 tons) has been dumped at landfills in communities of color — despite the fact that people of color make up only 26% of the population in the coastal counties in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The landfill that has received the most waste from the spill sits in a Florida community where three-quarters of the residents are people of color.
This is not a new problem. For decades, communities of color have borne an unfair share of the burdens and risks of waste disposal in the U.S. A disproportionate amount of toxic waste has found its final resting place near communities of color, which have the high cancer rates, asthma rates, and other environmental health problems that follow. The problem has been particularly acute in the Gulf region; a section of Louisiana has become known as “Cancer Alley.”
Still, the racial disparity in toxic dumping continues, and federal regulators have not done enough to stop it.
==================
well, there's 24 kilotons of oil that has disappeared out of the Gulf waters.
It was only a matter of time before this story got its racial component.
Just read up on Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins. She's pretty much the female equivalent of Van Jones.
Why do racist, race-bating right-wingers always say racism isn't present?
LMAO at "race-bating right-wingers".
I believe that racism exists -- I just don't think EVERYTHING has a racial component.
Perhaps landfills are located in "communities of color" (I really love that one) because the land is cheap? Perhaps?
You guys don't get it. It is not politically expedient for there to be any problems.
Therefore there are no problems...
I think it would be more correct to say that property near landfills is cheap, therefore people with lower wagers live there. The statistics simply are that blacks make less than whites.
Nothing racial about facts.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/08/19/gul...ex.html?hpt=T1
Yep. Disaster over.
I'm glad we seem to have dodged the bullet this time, in the short term.It remains to be seen whether subtle, long-lasting environmental damage from the spill will be found, as has been the case after other large oil spills.
We'll see what happens long-term. Hopefully that won't be too bad either.
Such incidents will happen again. It is simply a statistical inevitability.
That is one of the costs of oil production that the knee-jerk anti-environmentalists would like to gloss over.
Tell me.
Just how did they determine it was oil from the gulf spill rather than natural seepage, which when slow, would absorb enough heavier elements to keep it submerged rather than having it float?
There is so much oil there, much of it is natural seepage. Therefore, I demand, how do you know it is from the spill?
That's addressed in the article leemajors posted if you care to read it, WC.
Seepage.
But seriously, why do you need to be play-pretend skeptical about something so freaking obvious? Where else would the oil have come from but the Giant Oil Disaster down the way? Can you name any other instances of giant underwater oil plumes caused by seepage that have been observed by marine biologists or any other maritime characters anywhere else ever? I, err, demand them.
I read it.
Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Ins ution said they detected a plume of hydrocarbons in June that was at least 22 miles long and more than 3,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, a residue of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
According to the ins ution, the 1.2-mile-wide, 650-foot-high plume of trapped hydrocarbons provides at least a partial answer to recent questions asking where all the oil has gone as surface slicks shrink and disappear.
"These results indicate that efforts to book-keep where the oil went must now include this plume" in the Gulf, said Christopher Reddy, a Woods Hole marine geochemist and oil spill expert. He is one of the authors of the study, which appears in the Aug. 19 issue of the journal Science.
Researchers saw the plume over two weeks in June but were chased away by Hurricane Alex, Reddy told CNN Radio.
"I have no idea where those compounds are now," he said.
Another of the report's authors said the plume has probably moved elsewhere, noting that the BP-operated well has been capped for more than a month and that the plume was moving in a southwesterly direction at a rate of about 6.5 kilometers (4 miles) a day.
"(It's) extremely likely that the hydrocarbons in that plume have long moved elsewhere," report author Rich Camilli told CNN.
Reddy said that experts need more data before they can determine how much remains in Gulf.
Whether the plume's existence poses a significant threat to the Gulf is not yet clear, the researchers say. "We don't know how toxic it is," Reddy said in a statement, "and we don't know how it formed, or why. But knowing the size, shape, depth, and heading of this plume will be vital for answering many of these questions."
Camilli, also a Woods Hole scientist, said colder temperatures at the plume's extreme depths inhibited the degradation properties of oil.
Microbes act more slowly on the subsea oil than on surface oil because of lower temperatures, he said. If all other conditions were equal, microbes would eat up the plume's subsea oil about 10 times more slowly, Camilli said.
Meanwhile, Thad Allen, the government's point man for the oil disaster, responded Thursday on CNN to two recent studies that appeared to contradict the government's estimate that about 75 percent of the oil has been cleaned up.
Researchers at the University of South Florida have concluded that oil may have settled at the bottom of the Gulf farther east than previously suspected -- and at levels toxic to marine life. In addition, a team from Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia released a report that estimates that 70 to 79 percent of the oil that gushed from the well "has not been recovered and remains a threat to the ecosystem," the university said in a release.
Allen said the government has determined the flow rate to have been about 53,000 barrels a day, or a total of 4.9 million barrels.
"The next question is, what happened to it?" he said. "There are certain things we know for certain. We produced almost 827,000 barrels that we collected and brought ashore." The government also knows how much oil was skimmed, how much was burned and how much was affected by dispersant use. When that is added up, it leaves 26 percent still in the water, Allen said.
"That's not a definitive statement, but that's a way to start a conversation about the oil," Allen said. "You can take a lot of different estimates and run that formula, but that's the one we're starting with ... other than the 26 percent, the rest can be accounted for some way. That 26 percent is going to end up on a beach or dealt with somehow."
If someone finds some giant plume still in the Gulf, let me know.
WASHINGTON — A 22-mile-long invisible mist of oil is meandering far below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where it will probably loiter for months or more, scientists reported Thursday in the first conclusive evidence of an underwater plume from the BP spill.
The most worrisome part is the slow pace at which the oil is breaking down in the cold, 40-degree water, making it a long-lasting but unseen threat to vulnerable marine life, experts said.
Earlier this month, top federal officials declared the oil in the spill was mostly "gone," and it is gone in the sense you can't see it. But the chemical ingredients of the oil persist more than a half-mile beneath the surface, researchers found.
And the oil is degrading at one-tenth the pace at which it breaks down at the surface. That means "the plumes could stick around for quite a while," said study co-author Ben Van Mooy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Ins ution in Massachusetts, which led the research published online in the journal Science.
Monty Graham, a scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama who was not involved in the study, said: "We absolutely should be concerned that this material is drifting around for who knows how long. They say months in the (research) paper, but more likely we'll be able to track this stuff for years."
Late Thursday, federal officials acknowledged the deepwater oil was not degrading as fast as they initially thought, but still was breaking down "relatively rapidly." Jane Lubchenco, chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said agency scientists and others were "working furiously" to come up with actual rates of biodegradation.
She noted a bright spot from the slow breakdown of the oil: Faster would mean a big influx of oil-eating microbes. Though they are useful, they also use up oxygen, creating "dead zones" that already plague the Gulf in the summer. Dead zones are not forming because of the oil plume, Lubchenco said.
The underwater oil was measured close to BP's blown-out well, which is about 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The plume started three miles from the well and extended more than 20 miles to the southwest. The oil droplets are odorless and too small to be seen by the human eye. If you swam through the plume, you wouldn't notice it.
"The water samples when we were right in the plume look like spring water," study chief author Richard Camilli said. "You certainly didn't see any oil droplets and you certainly didn't smell it."
The scientists used complex instruments – including a special underwater mass spectrometer – to detect the chemical signature of the oil that spewed from the BP well after it ruptured April 20. The equipment was carried into the deep by submersible devices.
With more than 57,000 of these measurements, the scientists mapped a huge plume in late June when the well was still leaking. The components of oil were detected in a flow that measured more than a mile wide and more than 650 feet from top to bottom.
Federal officials said there are signs that the plume has started to break into smaller ones since the Woods Hole research cruise ended. But scientists said that wouldn't lessen the overall harm from the oil.
The oil is at depths of 3,000 to 4,000 feet, far below the environment of the most popular Gulf fish like red snapper, tuna and mackerel. But it is not harmless. These depths are where small fish and crustaceans live. And one of the biggest migrations on Earth involves small fish that go from deep water to more shallow areas, taking nutrients from the ocean depths up to the large fish and mammals.
Those smaller creatures could be harmed by going through the oil, said Larry McKinney, director of Texas A&M University's Gulf of Mexico research center in Corpus Christi.
Some aspects of that region are so little known that "we might lose species that we don't know now exist," said Graham of the Dauphin Island lab.
"This is a highly sensitive ecosystem," agreed Steve Murawski, chief fisheries scientist for the federal agency NOAA. "The animals down at 3,300 to 3,400 feet grow slowly." The oil not only has toxic components but could cause genetic problems even at low concentrations, he said.
Lubchenco said NOAA is "very concerned about the impact" of the oil below the surface and federal officials last week started more aggressive monitoring of it.
For much of the summer, the mere existence of underwater plumes of oil was the subject of a debate that at times pitted outside scientists against federal officials who downplayed the idea of plumes of trapped oil. Now federal officials say as much as 42 million gallons of oil may be lurking below the surface in amounts that are much smaller than the width of a human hair.
While federal officials prefer to describe the lurking oil as "an ephemeral cloud," the Woods Hole scientists use the word "plume" repeatedly.
The study conclusively shows that a plume exists, that it came from the BP well and that it probably never got close to the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, Camilli said. It is probably even larger than 22 miles long, but scientists had to stop measuring because of Hurricane Alex.
Earlier this week a University of South Florida team reported oil in amounts that were toxic to critical plant plankton deep underwater, but the crude was not necessarily in plumes. Those findings have not been reviewed by other scientists or published.
The plume is probably still around, but moving west-southwest of the BP well site at about 4 miles a day, Camilli said.
While praising the study that ended on June 28, Murawski said more recent observations show that the cloud of oil has "broken apart into a bunch of very small features, some them much farther away." Texas A&M's McKinney said marine life can suffer harm whether it is several smaller plumes or one giant one.
NOAA redirected much of its sampling for underwater oil after consulting with Woods Hole researchers. The federal agency is now using the techniques that the team pioneered with a robotic sub and an underwater mass spectrometer, Murawski said.
Previous attempts to define the plume were "like watching the Super Bowl on a 12-inch black-and-white TV and we try to bring to the table a 36-inch HD TV," said Woods Hole scientist Chris Reddy. The paper, fast-tracked for the world of peer-reviewed science, was written on a boat while still in the Gulf, he said.
Reddy said he could not yet explain why the underwater plume formed at that depth. But other experts point to three factors: cold water, the way the oil spewed from the broken well, and the use of massive amounts of dispersants to break up the oil before it gets to the surface.
The decision to use 1.8 million gallons of dispersants amounted to an environmental trade-off – it meant less oil tainting the surface, where there is noticeable and productive life, but the risk of longer-term problems down below.
Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government's point man on the Gulf oil spill, said it was a choice between two difficult options – with the discussions going on in front of the president. In the end, officials decided to "accept the implication of the hydrocarbons in the water column rather than Barataria Bay or the Chandeleur Islands" in Louisiana.
Given the slow rate at which the oil is degrading in the cold water, Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, and others say it is too early to even think about closing the books on the spill: "The full environmental impacts of the spill will thus not be felt for some time."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_688312.html
Going by data provided here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/conten...329/5994/888-a
But lemme guess: it's invisible so it must not be there... right?
"the crab larvae discovery was an ominous sign that crude had already infiltrated the Gulf's vast food web -- and could affect it for years to come.
"It would suggest the oil has reached a position where it can start moving up the food chain instead of just hanging in the water," said Bob Thomas, a biologist at Loyola University in New Orleans. "Something likely will eat those oiled larvae ... and then that animal will be eaten by something bigger and so on.""
http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-sp...idence_oi.html
"22 mile long invisible mist of oil"
lol
Strangely enough, the 22 mile long plume became a 22 mile long invisible mist in two months.
What's with the steady 22 mile length?
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