Posted on 07/26/2010 5:01:14 PM PDT by PilotDave
The numbers don't lie: two weeks ago, skimmers picked up about 25,000 barrels of oily water. Last Thursday, they gathered just 200 barrels.
Still, it doesn't mean that all the oil that gushed for weeks is gone. Thousands of small oil patches remain below the surface, but experts say an astonishing amount has disappeared, reabsorbed into the environment.
"[It's] mother nature doing her job," said Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
We should all be grateful to our president for waving his hand and accomplishing this miraculous feat!
Hey no big deal but there is no apostrophe in “dispersants”.
Well that’s good if that’s the case. It seemed with the hot summer temps down there that this would be no Exxon Valdez.
There has been a lot of misinformation even here on FR about this issue.
logic has long departed
We can now refer to it as the Swine Crude disaster
The dispersants must have done their job.........
That dispersant in the oil causing it to sink has to be as big a scam as global warming! Show me one instant in the oil spewing videos where the dispersant is sinking on its own? Nowhere. Dispersant BS story to the max.
So, we’re not all gonna die?
Dispersants can act like a surfactant and break up large clumps of oil into smaller droplets. It would still float though.
This was posted on an earlier thread and was from TOD, today.
******************************EXCERPT****************************************
Interesting series of posts at ZeroHedge, dated today.
I am on scene on one of the largest oceanographic research vessels working in the GOM. I am not being paid by NOAA or BP. This is a factual statement: Beyond 20 NM from the wellhead we have not detected subsurface oil at any depth in concentrations above 20PPM, beyond 40NM we have not detected any oil above 2PPM that was associated with Deepwater Horizon. We have seen the usual seep concentrations around Vioska Knoll, Green Canyon, etc.
Just wanted to add that out of tens of thousands of samples, the positive hits are coming from extremely limited areas “Plumes” which are measured in tens and perhaps hundreds of meters, not in miles. I have access to all of the raw and preliminary data coming in from 8 of the vessels sampling for the SMU (Subsurface Monitoring Unit)
* Shut down oil production permanently
* Made sleazy deals to continue oil production elsewhere
* Made large numbers of people completely dependent on government aid
* Lined the pockets of their friends
* Get paid back with billions in campaign donations
* Destroyed all of BP's competition
“as big a scam as global warming!”
Don’t be so sure global warming is a scam. Where I live it was 88 degrees today.
Only 6 months ago it was in the teens and we had snow.
If the sentence was “The dispersant’s properties cause...” then it would have an apostrophe (possessive) I believe.
[wind]
[clop clop clop]
King Arthur: Whoa there!
[clop clop clop]
Soldier #1: Halt! Who goes there?
Arthur: It is I, Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, from the castle of Camelot. King of the Britons, defeater of the Saxons, Sovereign of all England!
Soldier #1: Pull the other one!
Arthur: I am, ...and this is my trusty servant Patsy. We have ridden the length and breadth of the land in search of knights who will join me in my court at Camelot. I must speak with your lord and master.
Soldier #1: What? Ridden on a horse?
Arthur: Yes!
Soldier #1: You’re using coconuts!
Arthur: What?
Soldier #1: You’ve got two empty halves of coconut and you’re bangin’ ‘em together.
Arthur: So? We have ridden since the snows of winter covered this land, through the kingdom of Mercia, through—
Soldier #1: Where’d you get the coconuts?
Arthur: We found them.
Soldier #1: Found them? In Mercia? The coconut’s tropical!
Arthur: What do you mean?
Soldier #1: Well, this is a temperate zone.
Arthur: The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land?
Soldier #1: Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
Arthur: Not at all. They could be carried.
Soldier #1: What? A swallow carrying a coconut?
Arthur: It could grip it by the husk!
Soldier #1: It’s not a question of where he grips it! It’s a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound coconut.
Arthur: Well, it doesn’t matter. Will you go and tell your master that Arthur from the Court of Camelot is here?
Soldier #1: Listen. In order to maintain air-speed velocity, a swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?
Arthur: Please!
Soldier #1: Am I right?
Arthur: I’m not interested!
Soldier #2: It could be carried by an African swallow!
Soldier #1: Oh, yeah, an African swallow maybe, but not a European swallow. That’s my point.
Soldier #2: Oh, yeah, I agree with that.
Arthur: Will you ask your master if he wants to join my court at Camelot?!
Soldier #1: But then of course a— African swallows are non-migratory.
Soldier #2: Oh, yeah...
Soldier #1: So, they couldn’t bring a coconut back anyway...
[clop clop clop]
Soldier #2: Wait a minute! Supposing two swallows carried it together?
Soldier #1: No, they’d have to have it on a line.
Soldier #2: Well, simple! They’d just use a strand of creeper!
Soldier #1: What, held under the dorsal guiding feathers?
Soldier #2: Well, why not?
The well is damaged and cannot be repaired. They will cement it shut and then drill other production wells into the same reservoir. Don’t worry, we will get that oil. Unless, of course, Obama continues on his destroy American tack. But what are the chances of THAT happening?
Mea Culpa. I just couldn’t resist it...
Oh no. You're already dead. You just don't know it yet.
BTW, your Democrat absentee ballot is in the mail.
By the time it settles on the bottom, tar balls are the result. They also occur down here naturally... but not to this extent. The marshes are where the damage is... they never talk about that or show the wildlife covered in this tar substance.
LLS
You sound almost, dare I say, liberal with your castigation of a Reaganest outlook to the crisis. Where’s the sense of balance? The resistance to the facts on the ground. It’s almost liberal in it’s misplaced hysteria.
This just in, the spill did happen at the perfect time in the temperature loop and yes it did burn off and no it doesn’t sink, dispersed or not. Dispersant simply dispersed the oil and it was evaporated out that much quicker. The oil that came out of that particular find is of the highest quality, light sweet crude, full of methane. It would burn magnificently under a cruel Gulf sun. If what you are seeing wash up is a tar ball, guess what, the worst has passed. Tar is the inert leftovers of a volatile brew of crude. It’s the burnt charcoal briquet in the grill.
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