Breakdown is proving slower than expected
By Janet Raloff
Thursday, August 19th, 2010
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| Oil plumes from the BP oil spill appear to be slow to disperse, as researchers found in June when a submersible vehicle (yellow) mapped a plume of oil 1,100 meters below the surface that stretched 35 kilometers long. |
It appears that BP and so many people were wrong about what happen to the estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil (almost 206 million gallons) the escaped from the damaged well before it was successfully capped on July 15. I remember talking to my father this summer and asking him if there was any news and he said that it was amazing, that all the oil had biodegraded. I told him that was impossible and that it had to be somewhere.
The Woods Hole team has mapped a huge plume of diffuse hydrocarbons more than 35 kilometers long. As this cloud of oil flowed roughly 1,100 meters below the surface, it maintained a configuration that was roughly 200 meters high, up to 2 kilometers wide and traveling at about 6.7 kilometers per day. Over the entire span of the plume studied, the cloud’s height “only varied by tens of meters,” notes Woods Hole team leader Richard Camilli.
The scary thing is that scientist are saying that it is not going away. Oil that has resisted dispersion and evaporation likely will “remain potentially harmful for decades,” MacDonald said at the congressional hearing, adding: “I expect the hydrocarbon imprint of the BP discharge will be detectable in the marine environment for the rest of my life.”
This interested me because when I lived in Zimbabwe I thought this was the worst environmental disaster in my life time and it seemed like so many people in the U.S. just went back to business after the oil was capped and never looked back. It was over. Now the is information that is far from over. I love the marine environment and it breaks my heart to hear the news.
This article connects to all of us. We as human being have an impact on the environment and this is yet another example. We have no idea what the long term effects are going to be from the oil that is moving 1000 meters below the surface and the sad thing is we don't seem to care until it washes up on our shores and it effects our lively hood. If we don't start being more aware of our behaviors then the consequences will be our downfall and the end to our existence on this planet.
If you want to read this article then click the link below.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/62415/title/Most_BP_oil_still_pollutes_the_Gulf%2C_scientists_conclude
