(They can't find it now because it's bigger on the inside than on the outside.)
~~Not to worry! The Doctor's got the spill under control.~~
MORE HERE:
The appearance and disappearance of the oil helped convince the scientists the plume was not so much a plume. Instead, it appeared to act like a cloud, forming and dissolving in the deep currents.
“Whatever it is,” Larry Mayer, a University of New Hampshire professor and ocean researcher who joined the government’s search for the undersea oil this week, “it is something that is variable in space and time.”
This is to say, still a bit of a mystery.
At a minimum, more than half a million barrels of oil have flowed into the gulf since BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, leaving 11 men dead. Skimmers and controlled burns have removed some of the oil, but vast slicks coat the ocean surface.
Scientists — first from the University of South Florida, now joined by the government — are racing to find it, to study it and to help block it before it washes ashore.
A few clues have fallen into place. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Tuesday that its tests had confirmed the existence of broad areas of subsurface oil as far as 142 nautical miles from the leak source, in depths from 50 meters to 1,400 meters. The concentration of the oil was low, and only some of it could be definitively linked to the Deepwater Horizon.
Aboard the Thomas Jefferson, the search for details has transformed the 208-foot ocean-floor-mapping vessel into a high-tech fishing boat trolling for oil instead of red snapper.
Before the ship set sail from Galveston, Texas, last week, commanding officer Lt. Denise Gruccio wound wire onto winches until 4 a.m. She and her crew bought every ounce of Dawn dish soap on the shelves at a local Home Depot to pour into steel tubs onboard for improvised oil-cleaning stations. They secured two refrigerators on the starboard deck with a wide yellow strap to keep water samples cool.
They also loaded special equipment onto the ship, including three tools for hunting plume: a revolver-style collection of water-sampling tubes, a traditional and time-consuming option; a sophisticated sonar device, which works like a souped-up fish finder from a bass boat; and a steel-gray canister dubbed “the fish,” which scans the shallows and depths for oil using florescent imaging.
The Thomas Jefferson crew pioneered the idea to use all the tools in concert.
“The ability to map underwater oil is far from settled science,” said NOAA ship Cmdr. Shepard M. Smith, who on Tuesday briefed a small group of reporters on the methods. “There’s no great body of knowledge about how this will work.”
Yet the results from the ship’s first few days at sea proved encouraging. Crew members cast the so-called fish into deep and shallow waters 172 times in the first three days. Crew members poured the water samples from the deep waters into plastic bottles.
Mayer and colleagues including Alex De Robertis, a fisheries biologist and sonar expert, built computer maps of areas where the fish canister and the other sensors detected oil.
“something that is variable in space and time.”
What’s Zero doing down there?
A ****ing ghost?
These guys are guessing.,
“Whatever it is,” Larry Mayer, a University of New Hampshire professor and ocean researcher who joined the government’s search for the undersea oil this week, “it is something that is variable in space and time.”
Idiots in charge thanks to Obama.
(They can't find it now because it's bigger on the inside than on the outside.)
~~Not to worry! The Doctor's got the spill under control.~~
for later
The ghost of Gulf of Mexico past.
