The oil's eighty-sixed
-- by Horatio Algeranon
"Mission Accomplished", the oil's almost gone
Eighty-six days was not so long.
The oil impacts were overstated
The augured "disaster" evaporated.
Corexit dispersant saved the day
Kept the surface oil at bay.
The "Oil Pie" is mostly eaten
Microbe-devoured and weather-beaten
The "Great Unknowns" are very small,
If they're really even there at all.
The seafood's safe and water's fine
You eat first and then we'll dine.
Update Aug 18
The "Official" Washington proclamations are not always the same as reality: ( ~@:> )
"I am writing this from New Orleans where I have spent much of the summer as a staging ground for my work in the Gulf during the
terrible oil spill catastrophe that has dominated the last three months. The well was finally capped three weeks ago and no more oil is spilling into the Gulf. While this is a welcome development we have suddenly shifted back into the familiar mode of willful ignorance. The idea that somehow the problem is solved dominates the headlines yet responsible science and common sense tell us that oil persists in the environment and that we will be fighting this for a long time to come"
"Twenty years after
the Exxon Valdez spill, none of the ecosystems in that region have recovered fully and oil is still present. New reports in the Gulf are finding crab larvae with oil in their tissue suggesting that the oil is beginning to infiltrate the food chain with dire long-term consequences."
"The problem is, we just don’t know and our eagerness to declare “mission accomplished” is premature at best."
"A
report [pdf] by five prominent oceanographic experts released this week by Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia concludes that up to 79 percent of the oil released into the Gulf from the BP disaster has not been recovered -- and remains a serious threat to the ecosystem."
"The Georgia researchers estimated how much of the oil could have evaporated, degraded or weathered and concluded that 70 to 79 percent of the spill oil remains. They showed that it was impossible for most of the dissolved oil to have evaporated since large plumes remain trapped in deep water."
From "
Toxic Oil Settling on Gulf Floor"
( Video: "Exclusive report, CNN's Ed Lavandera says researchers found oil and dispersants built up on the ocean floor.")
"The preliminary results, the scientists believe, show that oil that has settled on the floor is contaminating small sea organisms.
"The researchers found micro-droplets of oil scattered across the ocean floor and they also found those droplets moving up through a part of the Gulf called the DeSoto Canyon, a channel which funnels water and nutrients into the popular commercial and recreational waters along the Florida Gulf Coast.
The scientists say even though it's getting harder to see the oil the Gulf is still not safe."
"This whole concept of submerged oil and the application of dispersants in the subsurface and what are the impacts that it could have, have changed the paradigm of what an oil spill is from a 2-dimensional surface disaster to a 3-dimensional catastrophe," said David Hollander, a chemical oceanographer and one of the lead scientists on the recent USF mission."
From "Scientists Find Thick Layer Of Oil On Seafloor" (NPR -- Richard Harris)
September 10, 2010 -- Scientists on a research vessel in the Gulf of Mexico are finding a substantial layer of oily sediment stretching for dozens of miles in all directions. Their discovery suggests that a lot of oil from the Deepwater Horizon didn't simply evaporate or dissipate into the water — it has settled to the seafloor.
From "Gulf Oil Spill: Bacteria mainly ate the gas, not the oil" (LA Times, September 16, 2010)
Bacteria that attacked the plumes of oil and gas from the Deepwater Horizon gusher in the Gulf of Mexico mainly digested natural gas spewing from the wellhead — propane, ethane and butane — rather than oil, according to a study published in the journal Science.
The paper doesn't rule out the possibility that bacteria also are consuming oil from the spill, the authors said. Instead, it suggests that natural gas primed the growth of bacteria that may have gone on to digest "more complex hydrocarbons" — oil — as the spill aged and propane and ethane were depleted.
Still, lead author David L. Valentine, a professor of microbial geochemistry at UC Santa Barbara, said the findings temper hopes that microorganisms detected by scientists in the gulf have eaten up most of the oil there, as other scientists had recently suggested. "It's hard to imagine these bacteria are capable of taking down all components of oil," he said. "These stories about superbugs taking down all the oil — it's more complex than that."
Valentine said he will now investigate whether the bacteria began eating the spilled oil, or some component of it, as time passed. "We know there's gas consumption; we know these organisms are here. How did that transition over time?" he said. "Did they move to oil over time, or did they bias which components of the oil [were consumed] next? We don't know yet."
[Horatio's humble note to those who suggested up to a month ago that microorganisms had already eaten most of the oil in the water: sometimes it's good to actually see what the science says before drawing the conclusions (radical idea, no?)]
