Posted on 01/10/2017 7:42:04 AM PST by Behind Liberal Lines
Contrary to their own scientific intuition, Cornell researchers found that the body size of intertidal oysters didn’t change after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This offers evidence that either the mollusks recovered rapidly or that the accident lacked the severity to affect growth.
After the initial explosion April 20, 2010, which sank the Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible rig, about 3.2 million barrels of oil poured into the northern Gulf of Mexico until the well was capped July 15.
The scientists believe that the travel distance of the oil gave it time to degrade, and bacterial presence in the tissue and mantle fluids of Gulf Coast oysters can process and degrade ingested oil.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.cornell.edu ...
1. Deep Water Horizon spilled 3.2 billion barrels of oil into the gulf. (per the article)
2. How many billion barrels of water are in the gulf?
3. How many naturally occurring barrels of oil/petroleum are in the gulf?
1. 3.2 billion barrels translates into a bit less than 200 billion gallons.
2. The Gulf contains roughly 643 Quadrillion gallons of water http://www.gulfbase.org/facts.php
3. Which means that one is altering less than 1 ppm if my math is correct. I’d guess that one would not be altering content in an even manner.
I ate raw oysters in Louisiana last weekend and I’m here to talk about it! They were grrrrreat!
I think it was once described by Rush as a single drop from an eye dropper into a full bathtub.
The spill was sweet oil, not refined oil.
BP should have fought back and educated the public on the facts.
Sweet oil leaks into our oceans all the time.
I truly believe the article is low on the spilled crude and your number is a little high. Good friend and I did some calculations and determined that the well was flowing between 80 and 100 thousand barrels per day. Total flow was somewhere around 4.5 to 5 million barrels of crude.
Your number is considered to be a mega field. Billion versus million.
Another great story!
I will add it to my favorites.
1. Environmentalists screamed that the Alaska Pipeline would interrupt caribou migration routes and cause the extinction of these beautiful animals. Later, it was found that the little electric heaters installed every 100 yards or so were beloved by the caribou! In the little warm spot surrounding the heaters, the caribou congregated, cavorted, and...mated, thus replenishing the herd to an increased population never anticipated by anyone.
2. Al Gore, scheduled to speak at a “Global Warming Conference”, gets snowed in at the airport and misses his flight.
3. The same Al Gore uses more electricity in his Tennessee mansion than the entire rest of the county PUT TOGETHER!
4. Warmists claim that “Weather is not Climate”, and even though it is freezing cold and miserable on land, the OCEANS are heating up and this will kill all wildlife in the seas. Meanwhile, the waters around Florida were getting so cold that the beloved manatees were dying! That is, until the manatees discovered that the effluvia from the Palm Beach Nuclear Power Plant made the water warmer, so they began to congregate, cavort, and MATE there, becoming a minor tourist attraction.
5. Environmentalist HATE logging and try to cordon off large swaths of forest to keep out any kind of management, resulting in HORRIBLE forest fires.
6. The Oyster Story!
Thanks! :-)
Yes the same folks that claim weather is not climate when it is cold and snowing will gasp and point out hot days and drought as proof. Funny how that works.
I took the article’s barrels, multiplied by 55, and rounded up on the grounds that one ought to round against one’s self when arguing (probably about a 10% difference due to rounding).
I have no idea what your next to last sentence means, but would be very interested in learning. I also understand that your last sentence is meant to shed light on the previous sentence, but I don’t get it—my guess is that I’m off three orders of magnitude due to something I don’t understand.
Indeed! :-)
The oil doesn’t bother me as much as the corexit does.
Just to prove myself as pedantic, an oil barrel is 42 gallons not 55.
I think what he meant was that 3.2 billion barrels of oil is the amount of oil in an entire major oil field. For example, 4 billion barrels of oil is the estimated total recoverable amount of oil in the Bakken Shale formation (and that’s actually the upper-end estimate of 10%).
And there are specialized bacteria which feed on it.
More like a single drop into an Olympic swimming pool.
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