Senator Nelson released 4 new videos of gushing oil while NOAA declared the mission of the Pelican, it's only ship monitoring the oil at sea, accomplished.
Deep water reef in the northern Gulf of Mexico.
NOAA had one ship, the Pelican, monitoring the spill. It's mission was declared accomplished on May 16, the day before satellite photos showed oil being transported by the Loop current.
Even though their list of goals evolved and lengthened as the cruise progressed in response to those complexities, and colleagues’ requests, the team was still able to accomplish everything it set out to do. (editor's bold) "I think these two weeks were highly successful, says NIUST chief scientist Arne Diercks. "Everybody worked pretty hard on this trip to get this done." That, I can confirm.
The team has gathered critical sediment samples that can be used as a baseline for future studies of whether oil eventually makes it to the seafloor in substantial quantity and if so what the effects might be. Creating this and other baselines simply wouldn't have been possible had the team not managed to make it to the accident zone so quickly.
And, of course, they got early information about a plume nobody even knew existed, and water samples that will eventually tell much more of the story about where the oil is going and what effects it might have in the water column.
The EPA said on May 12,2010 they are doing extensive testing and monitoring of the effects of dispersants applied at depth.
Regulators have allowed the dispersant to be tested three times on the ocean floor, where it’s not been used before.
The effectiveness of underwater application is still being evaluated. Jackson said the first two tests were inconclusive, but she believes good data has been collected from the third test.
If subsea use is allowed to continue, it could be stopped at any point if issues arise, Jackson said.
Extensive testing and monitoring also are going on in areas where dispersant is being sprayed.
How can extensive testing and monitoring be done by no ships?
The Pelican's results over a very short monitoring period of less than one week showed very unexpected results. large layers of oil were found at various depths in deep water below the thermocline. Below the thermocline, oxygenation is slow because mixing is slow. These layers of oil and gas in cold dense water that doesn't mix will very likely create dead zones that could last for years.
"You've got to see this," says Arne Diercks, expedition chief scientist with the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology team, rushing into the main lab on board the Pelican. Soon after, to those gathering in the small room where readings from the sampling rosette come through on monitors, he points to the source of his excitement.
In a manner of speaking, the team had struck oil, or at least that was the best guess. Both the transmissometer, which measures particle levels, and the fluorometer, which detects dissolved oil (see previous posts), were showing very large concentrations of something at about 1,000 metres down, something we had not seen anywhere else.
"That, my friend, is the smoking gun," says Vernon Asper, an oceanographer on the team, "We've got to home in on this. You never see signals like that in the open ocean."
The Pelican's schedule forced the crew to move on quickly. They could not monitor the ongoing behavior of the deep underwater plumes of oil because they had to return to shore.
On the last day of the Pelican's mission the EPA approved the massive application of underwater dispersants. UNMONITORED. As the Pelican returned to shore.
Earlier today the Environmental Protection Agency approved application of dispersant at the wellhead. During tests of this new technique over the past few days, BP added over 100,000 litres of dispersant at depth. So, it's not clear whether the NIUST plume, assuming tests confirm it's oil, is strictly dispersed oil from these tests or whether some portion of it is heavier components of the crude oil that separated as the oil spread and rose to the surface. Or the answer may be somewhere in between.
Lisa Jackson should know that the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico is very cold, much like the water where the Exxon Valdez spill devastated the ecosystem. Cold water slows down the biological and chemical processes that allow nature to break down the oil. Moreover, because deep cold water mixes very slowly, it will be more likely to form dead hypoxic zones than the shallow Alaskan waters.
The Pelican's monitoring showed that low oxygen zones are already forming.
The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.
Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. "If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months," she said Saturday. "That is alarming."
However, yesterday, the Administrator of NOAA, Jane Lubchenco, dismissed the importance of the findings of the scientists monitoring the oil.
On Monday, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA, backed off researchers' assessment, issuing a statement saying their report of underwater oil columns were premature.
"No definitive conclusions have been reached by this research team about the composition of the undersea layers they discovered," Lubchenco said in the statement.
"Characterization of these layers will require analysis of samples and calibration of key instruments," the statement went on to say, before congratulating the scientists for their work. "The hypothesis that the layers consist of oil remains to be verified."
Dr Lubchenco, could those be layers of peanut butter and jellyfish?
Dan Fromkin reported the shocking news of NOAA's lack of monitoring of the oil.
The one ship associated with NOAA that had been doing such research is back in Pascagoula, Miss., having completed a week-long cruise during which scientists taking underwater samples found signs of just the kind of plume that environmentalists fear could have devastating effects on sea life of all shapes and sizes.
Meanwhile, the commander of the NOAA vessel that the White House on Friday claimed in a press release "is now providing information for oil spill related research" told HuffPost on Tuesday that he's actually far away, doing something else entirely.
"We are in the Western Gulf doing plankton research," said Commander Dave Score, reached by satellite phone on his research vessel, the Gordon Gunter. "So I really don't know. I'm just on orders."
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Two other NOAA research vessels are also in the area, but not monitoring the spill: The Thomas Jefferson, which has spent the last five days in Galveston, Texas; and the Oregon II, which has been under repair in Pascagoula for almost six months.
The Southern Environmental Law Center filed suit on May 17 to prohibit offshore drilling exemptions from in-depth environmental analysis, to make the government follow federal law.
SELC Takes Legal Action
On May 17, 2010, SELC filed a lawsuit challenging the Minerals Management Service for its complicity in the Gulf oil disaster and its failure to require a thorough examination of spill risks from exploratory drilling operations like British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon. Our legal filing seeks to overturn environmental review exemptions MMS has issued for more than 20 exploratory wells since the April explosion that destroyed the BP rig, and it seeks to prohibit the agency from continuing to exempt new exploratory drilling operations in the Gulf from an in-depth environmental analysis, which is required by federal law.
A Free Pass for Drilling Operations
According to documents we filed in court, MMS violated the National Environmental Policy Act by exempting BP’s Deepwater Horizon from an environmental review and by giving the same free pass to more than 20 new structures and exploratory wells in the wake of the Gulf disaster. These include four projects at almost twice the depth (over 9,000 feet) of the one currently hemorrhaging oil in the Gulf of Mexico (almost 5,000 feet). The agency’s continued issuance of these waivers—known as "categorical exclusions"—must be halted in light of the widespread environmental damage caused by the BP spill.
Hopefully, this lawsuit will stop the categorical exclusions for once and for all.
However, the suit will not stop the failure of EPA and NOAA to monitor and manage the huge Gulf oil spill.
"The fact that NOAA has missed the ball catastrophically on the tracking and effects monitoring of this spill is inexcusable," said Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska marine conservationist who recently spent more than a week on the Gulf Coast advising Greenpeace. "They need 20 research ships on this, yesterday."
Steiner explained: "This is probably turning out to be the largest oil spill in U.S. history and the most unique oil spill in world history," on account of it occurring not on or near the surface, but nearly a mile below.