Thursday, August 19, 2010

Extent of lingering Gulf oil plume revealed

Excerpts Taken from Nature News August 19 2010

Written by Amanda Mascarelli
The swathe of oil still stretching from the Deepwater Horizon spill is 35-kilometres long, according to a new report. The study, published in Science, is the first major peer-reviewed analysis of the underwater oil plume. It also indicates that the plume has persisted for several months, with oxygen measurements showing little sign of the oil being degraded quickly by microbes in the water.
A team led by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts found that the main plume is suspended at a depth of 1,000–1,200 metres below the surface and in some places is more than 2 kilometres wide and 200 metres thick. Other oil plumes are present in the Gulf of Mexico, but this was the first to be identified and is the most thoroughly sampled.
"Up to this point, people had identified hydrocarbons in subsurface waters, but they weren't able to say just how wide the plume was, how tall it was, or how long it was, or that it was continuous," says lead author Richard Camilli, an oceanographer at the WHOI.
Beginning at the site of the blown-out oil pipe, Camilli and his colleagues studied the plume's properties by zigzagging an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) through the plume. They suspect that the plume was longer than 35 kilometres, but their measurements were stopped short in late June by the approach of Hurricane Alex. But between 19 June and 28 June, the team took more than 3,500 real-time measurements of hydrocarbon concentrations and tracked the presence of 10 chemicals in the water column by using a mass-spectrometer that they lowered into the water by a cable. They made another 2,300 chemical measurements while sampling oxygen concentrations in the water.
The team has a "technological capability that is second to none on this planet," says John Kessler, a chemical oceanographer at Texas A&M University in College Station. "They can basically swim the AUV like a fish through this plume, measuring all the different oil and gas hydrocarbons and do a much more efficient job of mapping the area of this plume than anyone else can."

Read More Here
Yep, Its not going away and we have yet to see the worst. Shame on BP and our Government for telling us otherwise!






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