It's worse than they said:
Scientists Find Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf
Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
"There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water," said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. "There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column."
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.
Independent observers like SkyTruth and academic researchers have been saying for weeks now that the leak must be far worse than BP admits.
How much worse? Nobody can say for sure, in large part because BP refuses to provide the video footage and sensor data that would help establish exactly what is happening at the site of the leak, but according to the New York Times, based on the short snippets of video BP has released, scientists have estimated the leak to be gushing at somewhere between 25,000 and 80,000 barrels per day.
Despite these mind-numbing numbers, BP says it would be pointless to try to determine the size of the leak:
BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
"The answer is no to that," a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. "We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort."
That's infuriating. Nobody questions the urgency of stopping the leak, but how in the world can we hope to mitigate the damage it is causing if we don't even know how much oil is being spilled?
At this point, isn't it obvious that BP is more interested in protecting its own ass than in serving the public interest? Isn't it time for the Federal government -- at a minimum -- to step in and order BP to release any and all information that could help scientists and other independent observers establish how big this leak is?
Speaking purely in political terms, it's obvious that the administration must get out in front of this -- they can't afford to appear to be protecting BP or to be covering up the magnitude of the disaster. But that's not the important thing. The important thing is that the public deserves to know the scale of the environmental and economic catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. And the public deserves to know that in a time of crisis, the interests of a private company don't outweigh the national interest.
Join the discussion in YucatanMan's recommended diary, Vast Undersea Pollution - BP's (invisible) Disaster.
Update (12:13PM): BP says a tube has caught "some" oil from one of the leaking pipes:
Engineers successfully inserted a tube into the damaged riser pipe from which some of the oil is spewing, capturing "some amounts of oil and gas" before the tube was dislodged, the announcement said. The tube was inspected and reinserted, BP said.
"While not collecting all of the leaking oil, this tool is an important step in reducing the amount of oil being released into Gulf waters," the announcement said. It did not say why the tube had come dislodged or how much oil and gas were taken aboard the Discover Enterprise, the drill ship waiting to separate the oil, gas and water as it is siphoned off. The gas that reached the ship was burned using a flare system on board.
How can they say that it's reducing the amount of oil flooding the Gulf if they won't say how much oil was flooding the Gulf in the first place? The argument that we don't need to establish some sort of baseline is absolutely foolish. It's not even an argument; it's just a rhetorical flourish. BP is playing God with the economic and ecological fate of large swaths of the Gulf Coast. They must be more transparent.
