Posted on 06/02/2010 9:19:36 PM PDT by PhxRising
In the 1990s, thousands of Cubans cast themselves adrift on rafts, tires and any other makeshift craft that could float. They shoved off even from the island's far shore, entrusting their lives to the powerful Loop Current that pushes north from the Yucatán, rounds Cuba, rushes through the Florida Straits, and spills into the Atlantic, seeding the Gulf Stream. Many drowned or perished from thirst. But others survived to wash up on Florida's east coast.
Now the Loop Current is in the news once again. Oil from the Deepwater Horizon gusher—please don't call it a "spill"—has begun trickling into the current, prompting anxious speculation as to how much will be swept up and where it will be borne. Only a small quantity of surface oil has been seen entering the current, but much more swirls below. Given the complex natures of both petroleum and marine waters, these underwater plumes will be extremely difficult to measure and track.
Oil is far from a homogenous substance, even before it gets emulsified by waves, currents and sun. It's a complex mixture of liquids, gases and waxy solids that vary widely in weight and solubility. Ocean waters are likewise not uniform; they are made up of distinct water slabs differentiated by temperature and salinity, and propelled by wind and currents. When I first began using monitoring equipment—newly available in 1967—I tracked these water bodies-within-bodies and dubbed them "snarks" because of their elusiveness.
With their wide temperature range, Gulf waters are especially rich in snarks. Clouds of oil will become trapped in them and carried far into the Atlantic. How far? In 1977, as part of a joint U.S.-Soviet oceanographic project, I traced 10 deepwater snarks, whose temperature, salinity and chemical signatures revealed that they had traveled across thousands of miles of the Atlantic Ocean.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The Atlantic is not the only route the oil will take. Each year the Loop Current becomes "pregnant," bulging out toward Louisiana—and Deepwater Horizon. Sometimes the current loops back tightly enough to squeeze this bulge like a tied-off balloon, releasing a constellation of spinning eddies. Unlucky balseros who launched into the Loop Current in summer 1994 wound up swirling helplessly in these eddies, never nearing Florida.
Some eddies veer west, bouncing along the continental shelf at about three miles per day toward Texas. By late last month, according to mapping by Mitchell A. Roffer's highly regarded ocean forecasting service, this process had already begun: Tentacles of oil were extending west past the Loop Current. One eddy appears to have broken off and begun crawling to Texas. It may entrain escaping oil deep underwater for several months, relieving the Florida, Alabama and Mississippi coasts and the upper water column where most marine life lies.
By August, however, it will have moved too far from the wellhead to continue capturing the oil, which will resume flowing toward Florida. The westward-bound oil will weather, clumping into tarballs. Most of them will wash up along "the graveyard of the Gulf," Texas's Great Bend coast, just as debris from Hurricane Katrina did.
More crude will leach out from Louisana's spongy coastal wetlands, where it's now being absorbed, and also drift toward Texas. We will rediscover Deepwater Horizon's effects for many years to come.
Every 20 years or so, another oceanic oil spill or blowout reshapes our attitudes to petroleum and to the environment as a whole. In 1969, 20 years after the advent of offshore drilling, the Union Oil blowout off Santa Barbara forced us to confront its inherent risks and the cost of our hunger for fossil fuels. It inspired the first Earth Day and helped prompt the great wave of environmental regulation in the early 1970s. It may also have led to my being hired as Mobil Oil's first staff oceanographer, and enabled my colleagues and me to persuade the oil companies to build for much higher waves and stronger currents than they'd previously anticipated.
Ten years later, the Ixtoc 1 blowout—further south in the Gulf of Mexico, and a closer precedent for Deepwater Horizon—lasted 10 months and spewed more oil than any other accident. Because it involved a Mexican company and happened outside U.S. waters, it did not register with the same force in this country. But in 1989 the smaller but more visible Exxon Valdez spill delivered a wake-up call that still registers today. It brought home how vulnerable single-hulled tankers are, and it's still showing that spilled oil can persist in ecosystems for more than two decades.
We will also learn much from Deepwater Horizon, but at a great price.
So what is the One doing to clean up this mess? Has he deployed the US Coast Guard or US Navy to try to capture any of this oil in the Gulf? Has he deployed supertankers to try to suck up any of this oil? Has he sent people to clean up the beaches? What has he done, besides take 2 vacations and play golf every weekend?
He has Hollywood working on it.
The Sestak/Romanoff gusher seems to be spreading faster.
Isn’t this oil valuable enough to catch somehow?
He said today that he wanted to raise taxes on all oil companies. (Don't let a crisis go to waste!!)
A third of the earth/oceans and it will appear to be as blood. Nothing in it shall survive
Then what happens if it catches fire - russia says do it hurry hurry nuke it ...woe the cups ...woe
It’s about $73 dollars for a 44 gallon barrel. That seems like good fishing to me.
Terrorists will have a new target now, off shore oil platforms, that can cause all sorts of havoc.
Either way, it screwed up my Gulf Shores trip. I feel for those folks down there.
Isn’t there a way to make tarballs right at the Deepwater site and collect them as they surface?
Before they form as they roam off to beaches?
If Bammy has his way it will reach all over the world.
That’s possible for *some* of the emissions, certainly not all...”crude oil” is an astoundingly complex, very nonuniform (sometimes very gassy, sometimes methane gas, sometimes hydrogen sulfide gas) sometimes very solventy (benzene, xylene) sometimes very asphalty mixture of many compounds. And it changes over time. Not to mention all manner of inorganics in there, like sulfur, selenium, various metals. Anything you would do with it without refining it is probably throwing away most of its value.
Why did Costner's company even have to ask permission to go out and try to siphon up the oil? As long as they didn't get in anyone's way they should have been free to go out and try their luck and sell whatever they collected. I don't think anyone has a legitimate claim of ownership of the oil unless they have gone out and gathered it up.
There was supposed to be a plan for this type event already in place years ago.
I’d like to see more questions asked about it.
I read the other day that numerous nations offered to help but all were turned down. Great diplomacy and forward thinking there.
Then there have been the stories about the Saudis siphoning up and cleaning a major percentage of a much larger spill in the Persian Gulf. Can't ask them for an equipment loan or a how to lesson? Beats me what the story with that is.
Crap. I can’t wait for Hurricane season to settle in this year (it started yesterday in the Atlantic). /s
the 0bama admin and the progressive press are trying to get people to see BP as the villian.
sure, they were working the rig at the time of the explosion. but there were fees paid to the US govt for just such a situation. those fees were meant to go towards buying equipment to clean up any spills. obviously, govt types spent the money elsewhere (social programs)
my problem with 0bama isn’t that the hole isn’t plugged, although that would be nice... where i fault him is on HIS APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM.
as any good executive/manager would know, when presented with a problem, you divide it into manageable pieces... then put your best people on each piece. 0bama has not done that. he has not broken down the problem, 40+ days in.
people should be attacking his inability to MANAGE the crisis... which is exactly why Rudy was hailed after 9-11. not because he solved anything, but because he managed it efficiently allowing the people to function properly.
THIS is why experience matters. when you get to the top, on the job training is very expensive. in this case, the currency is the livelihood of the people of the gulf coast and the impact on the economy.
Come over to Panama City Beach, Florida! Our beaches are pristine and beautiful and accommodations abound.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.