We earlier blogged about how the oil that gushed out of that BP well in the Gulf appeared to be gone, having been broken down by natural processes. That was the line from the Obama administration. But now scientists are finding that the oil, indeed, is out there:
The oil is there, at least 22 miles of it. You just can’t see it.
A lot of the crude that spewed from BP’s ruptured well is still in the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s far below the surface and invisible. And it’s likely to linger for months on end, scientists said Thursday in the first conclusive evidence of an underwater plume of oil from the disaster.
The plume consists of droplets too small for the eye to see, more than a half-mile down, said researchers who mapped it with high-tech sensors.
Scientists fear it could be a threat to certain small fish and crustaceans deep in the ocean. They will have plenty of time to study it for answers.
In the cold, 40-degree water, the oil is degrading at one-tenth the pace at which it breaks down at the surface. That means “the plumes could stick around for quite a while,” said Ben Van Mooy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, a co-author of the research, published online in the journal Science.
Earlier this month, top federal officials declared the oil in the spill was mostly “gone,” and it is gone in the sense that you can’t see it. But the chemical ingredients of the oil persist, researchers found.
Monty Graham, a scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama who was not involved in the new research, said: “We absolutely should be concerned that this material is drifting around for who knows how long. They say months in the (research) paper, but more likely we’ll be able to track this stuff for years.”
via Major study proves oil plume that’s not going away.
Well, I don’t think that even the most optimistic scientists believed the oil literally ceased to exist, violating the law of the conservation of matter. If the oil now exists only as microscopic dots widely diffused and dispersed, detectable only by high-tech instruments, I’d say that is pretty much what “breaking down” means. And it’s hard to imagine how oil in this form would be all that harmful, since it’s the sludge that’s so bad for the environment, individual molecules of oil being nothing but carbon. You’d think environmentalists would be happy that the environment is not being devastated as predicted, but they seem strangely disappointed. They assume nature is so fragile that man can destroy it, playing down its self-renewing power. But OK, I’ll admit that the jury is out. Maybe this will turn into an eco-catastrophe after all.
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