Gulf oil spill is 10X worse than og estimate Vol. Exxon Valdez every 4 days

[nine point five]

jesus christ.

For more than three weeks now, crude oil has been eruptingout of a pipe a mile underneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. A newanalysis of seafloor video indicates that nearly 70,000 barrels are gushing outevery day, NPR reports. That is at least 10 times the U.S. Coast Guard'soriginal estimate of the flow, and "the equivalent of one Exxon Valdeztanker every four days."

And nobody really knows where it is, or where it's headed.

Federal officials are carefully tracking the trajectory ofthe oil that's made it to the water's surface and, increasingly, on shore. Theyeven put out a daily map.

But there's never been an oil spill this big and this deepbefore. Nor have authorities ever used chemical dispersants so widely.

As a result, some scientists suspect that a lot, if notmost, of the oil is lurking below the surface rather than on it, in a giganticunderwater plume the size and trajectory of which remain largely a mystery.

Oil on the surface can be fairly easily spotted byhelicopter and satellite. But tracking an underwater plume is a much morecomplicated task, which thus far appears confined to one lonely improvisingresearch vessel whose crew had been planning to hunt shipwrecks.

Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska marine conservationistwho recently spent more than a week on the Gulf Coast, said the NationalOceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] risks wildly underestimating thedamage caused by the massive spill.

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"If you don't look, you won't find, and they're notlooking in the right places," Steiner told the Huffington Post.

Most major oil spills occur right at the surface, heexplained. This one is entirely different.

With a spill this deep, the oil starts off extremely denseand under pressure. Some of it breaks up or dissolves into the water on the wayup, and some of it makes it all the way to the surface. But some will"stabilize in the water column" maybe as low as 200 to 300 meters offthe seabed, Steiner said. "Then it starts drifting with the current."

"I'm virtually certain that a lot of this oil hasn'teven surfaced yet," he said. "What we don't know is the trajectoryand direction of this subsurface toxic plume."

That's critically important information, both in order toassess what sorts of habitats the oil may be wiping out, and because "thisstuff can pop up in surprising places, weeks if not months from now," hesaid.

Another aspect of this spill that's unusual is the widespreaduse of chemical dispersants, applied both at the source and on the surface. Oilsprayed with dispersants on the surface, for instance, breaks into smalldroplets -- which could then remain suspended in the water column, Steinersaid.

Doug Helton, an emergency response coordinator in Seattlewho is NOAA's trajectory expert, told HuffPost on Thursday that measuring andtracking the oil beneath the surface is beyond NOAA's abilities at this point.

"We have some ideas of how it's working," he said.

"We think that for the most part the oil issurfacing," he added. And referring to a video that shows oil billowingout and up from the pipe, he noted that "you can see it's not stayingthere."

But tracking oil underwater "is a harder problembecause you can't just fly out with a helicopter to look at it or see it from asatellite," he said. "It's not a simple answer."

"We have models of how oil behaves when it releasesfrom the sea floor," he said. The models suggest that the oil from thisspill is spreading out in a huge cone, a mile high and about two miles across,initially. Then, he said "we can look at currents." But the currentsare not uniform at different depths.

"We have some testing that's trying to understand whatthe fate of that oil is, subsurface, but that's a problem," he said."It's a lot easier problem to model the stuff that's on the surface.

As it happens, Science journalist Mark Schrope is aboard theNational Institute for Undersea Science and Technology research vessel Pelican,which is spending the week taking water samples in the Gulf.

"As far as we know, this is the only research shipworking in the region, Schrope wrote on Monday.

    The mission,evolving on the fly, is a daunting one for the team. Most of the scientists aredoing work outside their normal bounds, and they're preparing to deployequipment that in some cases they've never seen before. They'll be doing theirbest to fill a growing list of requests from colleagues for samples and data,all aimed at better understanding the spill and what it's long-term impactsmight be.

On Tuesday, Schrope described finding "countless smalldead jellyfishes known as by-the-wind sailors, or Velella vellela, and known tobe susceptible to oil. Normally these animals, about the size of two fingerstogether, are blue and float on the surface with a triangular sail rising abovethe water. But those we see here are transparent and floating upside down, manystained with oil."

"So where is the oil now? " Schrope asked onWednesday. "That's really the guiding question of the whole expedition.The team will not be able to say for sure this week what's happening."

And on Thursday, Schrope wrote about how the scientists weredeveloping a hypothesis: That there's a layer of dispersed oil about two thirdsof a mile down. "This could be coming straight from the... gushing well,where the response team is now adding dispersants directly, and prevented fromsurfacing by the ocean's complex interplay of currents, density differences,and other factors," Schrope wrote. He continued:

    Eventually theteam found that farther away from ground zero the layer was lower... This mightshow the oil, likely aggregated with plankton and other organic material, issettling out over time....

    The team is now ona quest to define the bounds of this strange plume. NIUST chief scientist ArneDiercks compares the effort to hunting shipwrecks, which is one of the thingsthe group would have been doing on this expedition if they had not beendiverted to oil research.

    Defining the plumewill only tell a small piece of what's going on here, though. As for the largerquestions of what will happen to the plume, how far it will drift, and whateffect it might have on life in the deep, assuming it is in fact oil? "Idon't know," says [Vernon Asper, an oceanographer with the NIUST team],"I just don't know. But that's why we're here."

 

[10 piece nuggets]

So whats it looking like for Cancun?

 

[superantigen]

Wowww...

I'm really curious to see how local and global marine ecosystems will be affected by this plume as it creeps about and beneath the surface.

Ohh and humans FTMFL; we stay destroying this planet even though it's the only one we've got...

...

...

 

[nachobroadweezy]

we could really use Superman right now

 

[mangudai954]

I saw a map that suggested a lot of it could end up around the UK. Crazy.

 

[raise the cup]

Originally Posted by SuperAntigen

Wowww...

I'm really curious to see how local and global marine ecosystems will be affected by this plume as it creeps about and beneath the surface.

Ohh and humans FTMFL; we stay destroying this planet even though it's the only one we've got...

...

...

It's a damn shame how stupid us humans truly are

 

[jumpman247]

Originally Posted by NachoBroadway

we could really use Superman right now

What would superman do besides close the oil well, the damage is already done.

 

[rawse]

this is horrible..

 

[gil23]

 

[ballin starks]

yea crazy stuff.. check out this link, a google earth view.

http://paulrademacher.com/oilspill/#

 

[ballin starks]

 

[noskey]

RIP Gulf Coast

 

[nine point five]

 

[billy hoyle]

 

[tony ayooo]

can anything even be done to stop this? and what are they doing about the well underwater?

 

[ninjahood]

Originally Posted by tony AYOOO

can anything even be done to stop this? and what are they doing about the well underwater?

they need to just go underwater and nuke that joint shut.

 

[jd214]

Horrible

Too much money being wasted

 

[vsano]

Originally Posted by Raise the Cup

Originally Posted by SuperAntigen

Wowww...

I'm really curious to see how local and global marine ecosystems will be affected by this plume as it creeps about and beneath the surface.

Ohh and humans FTMFL; we stay destroying this planet even though it's the only one we've got...

...

...

It's a damn shame how stupid us humans truly are

And damn shame why many still think we can't destroy the earth...

 

[nine point five]

 

[fade on you]

 

[cadillacflow]

Surprised they haven't used this as excuse to raise gas to $5+ a gallon by now.

 

[young718chris]

Originally Posted by Billy Hoyle

 

[crumbs]

%%## bp

 

[dubstyledj]

Originally Posted by Noskey

RIP Gulf Coast

 

[ag 47]

Shameful really. I read a statistic that ONLY 5% of the Exxon Valdez oil was recovered....that's absolutely insane.