Very good article.....living on the MS gulfcoast we just cross our fingers and hope.
I'm sick and tired of all this fragile eco-system garbage. It's a robust self correcting sysytem designed by a power much greater than BP or POTUS. Mankind has an overwhelming sense of his own importance that I don't share!
Begone foolish mankind!
I think Obama sucked it all up with a straw.
There are two responses by any 'authority' that allow me to have confidence in them.
One is "I don't know", and the other is , "I could be wrong".
Does anyone out there realize that the Gulf of Mexico is an open system? Does anyone ever think about the scale of things involved? I swear that we are the dumbest society ever.
Think about this one thing:
The Mississippi river empties into the Gulf of Mexico. From Wikipedia:
“The Mississippi river discharges at an annual average rate of between 200 and 700 thousand cubic feet PER SECOND.”
Read that again.
“The Mississippi river discharges at an annual average rate of between 200 and 700 thousand cubic feet PER SECOND.”
One cubic foot equals 7.48051948 gallons.
If we take the mid-range of these numbers, this means that every second of every day 3,366,233 gallons of water are being flushed into the Gulf of Mexico, not all that far from the location of the BP Macondo well.
This equals 290,842,597,382 gallons per day. That’s 290 BILLION gallons, if you have a hard time with the zeros.
The absolute WORST case estimate for the Macondo well discharge is 4,200,000 gallons per day. Latest official estimate was 2,500,000 gallons per day. But lets use the absolute worst case whacko fringe doomer estimate.
Every day, the Mississippi river discharges a volume of water that is 69,248 times the size of the Macondo spill. For every one gallon of oil that came from the well, 69,248 gallons of water were going into the Gulf of Mexico.
Let’s pretend that no one recovered any of the oil for the sake of discussion. Since the well was releasing oil for 86 days, that’s (absolute worst case) 361,200,000 gallons of oil altogether.
Now that the spill is stopped, that 290 billion gallons of water per day from the Mississippi are diluting the remaining oil and dispersant. EVERY DAY, the amount of water entering the Gulf of Mexico is 805 times as much as the TOTAL amount of oil from the well.
Combine this with the fact that powerful currents carry water into and out of the Gulf from the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. These currents dwarf the size of the Mississippi in terms of the volume of water flowing.
Certainly, the effect of the oil spill on marine life and coastal areas is terrible for those areas affected. My heart goes out to those suffering from the economic impact.
BUT... the Gulf of Mexico is an open system, and in the actual scale of things, all the oil spilled from the Macondo well is microscopic. Over time the oil will disappear and the area will recover.
I hope this information helps someone, somewhere put things in perspective.
The more volatile components EVAPORATED within a few days!
Why have they not measured the oil in the water? Because it is too dilute?
Why have they not measured the Corexit in the water? Because it has degraded? Degraded into what? Are the degradation products measurable?
They have measured the methane, but there isn’t any mention of the saturation point for methane in salt water. So, is high methane a concern? Does it not ever come out of solution, even with winds and waves? Is methane accumulated or is it a transient presence?
This person is on a Federal grant. The ecosystem is so fragile and she and her team are concerned, but they haven’t measured two products that everyone is hyping as worrisome and it will be another 2 1/2 weeks before they go out again and then it is for a month at the height of hurricane season. That could delay the data gathering for even longer. Active weather could change all the values they have measured so far.
Not my field, but, while I can understand the need for time to gather data and some more time to analyze that data, it seems to take quite an amount of time to even produce a report. For those who are working scientists, does this amount of time to produce a report on something that is concerning about effects on something that is fragile, seem reasonable? How many data points over what sort of area over what sort of time would be expected?