As we watch newly released videos of the massive quantities of oil and gas gushing from the BP oil disaster, more attention will be focused on learing where the oil is and where it’s going. It turns out the Minerals Management Service (MMS) had long ago thought about this problem and conducted a "field test" 10 years ago to determine what might happen. Their finding: the oil could form underwater plumes that drift below the surface unseen.
On Saturday, a group of scientists suggested they’d found evidence much of the oil might be forming huge subsurface plumes, possibly miles across, which might be drifting with the current by remaining mostly underwater. But by Monday, the head of NOAA, responsible for overseeing studies of oceanic impacts downplayed that speculation as "premature," accusing the media of getting ahead of the facts. And the scientists who until then had been happy to talk to the media suddenly went silent, leaving us to wonder why.
The presentation tells an interesting story.
Ten years ago, MMS engaged industry in a field test of what might happen in a deepwater blowout. The idea of a field test arose in 1997, when MMS and the industry realized three things: (1) an increasing proportion of all off-shore extraction would occur in deeper and deeper water, (2) there was a significant risk of a deepwater blowout, so they better plan for it; (3) there was insufficient understanding of how the released oil and gas would behave at such depths and under the pressure/temperature conditions existing at various depths.
The designers of the field test put together an industry consortium with everyone chipping in money and equipment. They would create an artificial blowout in deep water, releasing volumes of oil and gas at the ocean floor and then observe and measure the effects
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/48987
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