Hey, buddy, where's all that oil I was promised?!
Posted on 08/20/2010 11:15:52 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
This study was done in late June, a decades-long-time-ago in “bacteria time”.
Just found this article about the underwater oil plumes.
Started by Doug in LA on August 19, 2010 - 2:57pm
See link at post #22....for lot’s of detail ....
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ROCKMAN on August 19, 2010 - 3:41pm
rainy - Their published numbers make no sense. They say the plume is about 600' thick and 22 miles long. That's about 70 million cu ft. They also say the concentration is 50 parts/billion. My calculator says that's less than 4 cubic feet of oil. Unless I missed a bunch of decimal place or there's some big typos in that report BP ought to love that report.
For goodness sake someone prove me wrong!
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Acornus on August 20, 2010 - 3:06am says:
Remember what I said a while back. From a UK Institute for Oceanography Prof'.
"If the GOM was scaled to the size of an Olympic swimming pool, all the oil that came out of the well, into the GOM, would be represented by one cubic centimetre in that swimming pool".
bttt
I am betting the bacteria are smarter than all the Harvard graduated scientists.
Blah blah blah, yada yada yada.....
Wish it weren’t August and there was something important to write about.
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bytp on August 19, 2010 - 7:14pm
The cloud or plume isn't settling to the bottom: its neutrally buoyant at a band of water densities occurring ~1000-1300m of depth. The PAHs _might_ settle to the bottom; no one has sampled yet, and I don't know of any equipment that would work to collect samples from the unconsolidated floc/sediment at depth.
The supplemental information on the Science paper is available for free:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;science.1195223/DC1 (21 page pdf)
From what I can tell, the results tell the pretty much the same story as preliminary reports from the current cruise:
Spatially-extensive fine droplets of hydrocarbon at 1000-1300m depths detectable with AQUAtrack fluorometers but not CDOM fluorometers (different excitation wavelengths for oil v. DOM).
The plume or whatever you want to call the blob extends SW from the wellhead; most subsurface water column work appears to focus on that area. Note that the WHOI cruise didn't find the end of the plume: they had to stop sampling ~20 miles out due to the storm. If you take the 4 miles per day movement reported in the press releases (or 10km ~ 1.5 days in the supplement), the Camilli et al. sampling was only looking at 5 or 6 days of output from the well.
Much less DOM depletion in the water with the droplets than reported earlier & elsewhere. The Camilli et al. interpretation is that other reports were false measurements, as hydrocarbons are known to affect membrane-based DO sensors and give false low readings. The implication is that other reports substantially overestimated biodegradation rates in deep, cold water. Camilli et al. also treat distance from the wellhead as a proxy for oil droplet age, and obtain a second low estimate of the rate of microbial respiration.
The Camilli et al. paper report BTEX from their water samples. Until I read the full paper, I don't know about other fractions of the oil/dispersant mixture.
[Toxicity is not the only potential for biotic effects of the droplets. Given the size of the droplets and how zooplankton filter feed by setting up small currents, there's a potential for mechanical clogging and other sublethal effects: they're living at very different Reynolds numbers than we do.]
Aside from that 3rd dimension that tripped up Rockman (he's only approximately infallible), if you want to estimate how much oil is in the plume, you probably need to use 4 miles per day * the number of days you think the well flowed at the mid- to late- June rate as the length; the height (depths) is probably constrained by density, and based on figure S9 you could estimate a constant width.
If you're interested in a budget of the fates of the oil, there's certainly more you could do by comparing the composition of the oil + dispersant to the BTEXs reported here; I don't know enough chemistry to attempt that. If you just want to know what's out there now, you might be able to estimate an amount of missing PAHs.
Whichever way the posters who seemed to know what they were doing did the math, there's not a lot of oil in that plume because it is already so dispersed.
Not until the next big hurricane. In the meantime, it will just pollute the fish and kill the fishing industry in the Gulf.
Maybe the reason the bacteria haven't surged in population is because there is nothing there for them to eat.
Since phytoplankton only have a lifespan of about a week, this would appear to mean they are an excellent organic means of filtering out the random molecule of petrochemical and taking it harmlessly to the remote bottom as they die.
” this would appear to mean they are an excellent organic means of filtering out the random molecule of petrochemical and taking it harmlessly to the remote bottom as they die.”
.
They don’t “take it to the bottom,” they turn it into food, then become food themselves for the larva of zooplankton, which in turn become food for other sea life....
Its a Win - Win - Win - Win - Win - Win - Win proposition.
.
Basically just more chicken little BS!
Nothing will make light molecules remain on the bottom.
Gravity rules.
“So in other words, there doesn’t seem to be a signficant ecological impact here.”
.
No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!
Don’t say that, then we can’t get federal grants to continue studying this dissipating- er- massive problem.
That is what it is all about.
Hey, buddy, where's all that oil I was promised?!
“With more than 57,000 of these measurements, the scientists mapped a huge plume in late June when the well was still leaking. The components of oil were detected in a flow that measured more than a mile wide and more than 650 feet from top to bottom.”
Why are they not reporting the results of these measurements. It seems to me they are withholding the results so we assume the worst.
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