Why the Gulf Spill's Effects Will Be Bad, But Limited

[MineralMan]

1. The Gulf of Mexico has a total area of about 600,000 square miles.
2. The total area of oceans on the planet Earth is about 335,258,000 square miles.
3. The Gulf of Mexico makes up 0.18% of the total ocean area on the Earth.
4. The area of the Gulf of Mexico closed to fishing is about 45,728 sq. miles. (7.6% of Gulf's area)
5. Over 92% of the total Gulf is still open for fishing.

This is a terrible oil disaster, and it will affect many people and impact a large area in the Gulf area, and perhaps even outside of the gulf. The oil is still spilling, so these numbers may change.

The bottom line, however, is that this Gulf oil disaster will not destroy all life in the Gulf of Mexico, destroy all of the shoreline surrounding the gulf, nor, by any means become some sort of global environmental disaster. It is a disaster, but not one that will ruin the planet.

It is important to recognize exactly what the parameters are that we are discussing. It's a very bad thing, but alarmist statements about global ecological disaster are overblown to a very, very large degree.

We need to solve this and clean it up. We do not need to blow it completely out of proportion. That does nothing to help solve the problem, and makes those who do so appear less informed than they should be.

[FBI_Un_Sub]

1. Big Oil

will have to set aside funds for future accidents -- both remediation and law suits.

[MineralMan]

7. Yes. They should have been required to do that for a long, long

time.

[Statistical]

36. Well technically they have....

The $75 mil liability cap was part of the same bill (oil pollution act of 1990) that created a fund (paid for by tax per barrel of oil) to pay for claims.

http://www.epa.gov/oem/content/learning/oilfund.htm

[leveymg]

2. The real damage hasn't even started. This is just the first round.

The thing's been leaking for 43 days, and the sheen just reached the beaches in the last few days. It'll probably continue spewing at least until August, and probably considerably longer unto the bipass can be completed.

This is nothing. Just wait until the first hurricane hits. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

[DURHAM D]

14. Any particular reason why you shaved off 10 days?

[leveymg]

28. Just a misprint

[mod mom]

37. Here is a MIT Professor's take on the upcoming hurricane season:

AND THEN THERE IS THE COMING HURRICANE SEASON:



JON HAMILTON: Back in the 1960s, researchers wondered whether an oil slick might actually stop a hurricane. So, a few years ago, Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at MIT, tested the idea in his lab. He used fish oil, a tank of water and a hurricane powered by a fan.

Dr. KERRY EMANUEL (Professor of Meteorology, MIT): The net result was that when you get up to moderately high wind speeds, the film on the surface just breaks apart as you might guess it would.

HAMILTON: Suggesting that an actual hurricane wouldn't even be weakened by an oil slick.

And in Emanuel's experiment, the swirling winds seem to sweep up the oil. So, a hurricane in the Gulf might suck up oil along with sea spray and deposit it on land. Emanuel says it's all speculation because it's never happened before.

And recently Emanuel has been speculating about ways an oil slick could actually make a hurricane more powerful.

Dr. EMANUEL: Right now, sitting out there as it is in the Gulf, you have this black surface and it's doing two things. First of all, it's absorbing sunlight. And secondly, it is curtailing evaporation from the Gulf right now.

HAMILTON: Emanuel says both of those things tend to trap heat in the water.

Dr. EMANUEL: So, theoretically, the Gulf underneath this oil slick should be getting hotter than it normally would be.

HAMILTON: And hot water is one factor that drives small hurricanes to become big ones. It's hard to know for sure if the area near this lake is getting hotter because the oil makes satellite temperature readings unreliable.

Emanuel says not only is it possible that the oil spill could make a hurricane worse, the reverse might also be true. For example, the hurricane could magnify the effects of the spill by pushing oil into coastal wetlands.



http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=127036434

Think of a hurricane spewing the toxic mixture of oil & Corexit 9500 ( highly toxic dispersant being used) inland. A very frightening scenario.

[leveymg]

38. I was just talking about all that oil getting pushed with a tidal surge up all those rivers . . .

bad enough without the crude oil-Corexit shower 50 to 100 miles inland.

Gawd forbid. When was the last hurricane season without a big storm in the Gulf?

[mod mom]

39. 2009 was way below average:

The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season was a below-average year in which nine tropical storms formed, the fewest since the 1997 season.<1> Although Tropical Depression One formed on May 28, the season officially began on June 1, 2009 and ended on November 30.<2><3> The season's last storm, Hurricane Ida dissipated on November 10.<4> The season had eleven tropical depressions, of which nine intensified into tropical storms, three became hurricanes, and two became major hurricanes. The inactivity throughout the basin was linked to the formation of an El Niño, which increased wind shear.<1> The two most significant storms of the season, in terms of loss of life and damage, were Hurricanes Bill and Ida. Hurricane Bill was an unusually large storm and was also the season's strongest, attaining winds of 135 mph (215 km/h).<5> Tropical Storm Claudette was the only storm during 2009 to make landfall in the United States.<6>


AND THEN THERE IS THAT RUSSIAN SCIENTIST WARNING. LET'S HOPE THIS CURRENT.COM ARTICLE IS WRONG:

Toxic Oil Spill Rains Warned Could Destroy North America
SOURCE: http://www.eutimes.net/2010/05/toxic-oil-spill-rains-warned-could-destroy-north-america/

A dire report prepared for President Medvedev by Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources is warning today that the British Petroleum (BP) oil and gas leak in the Gulf of Mexico is about to become the worst environmental catastrophe in all of human history threatening the entire eastern half of the North American continent with “total destruction”.

Russian scientists are basing their apocalyptic destruction assessment due to BP’s use of millions of gallons of the chemical dispersal agent known as Corexit 9500 which is being pumped directly into the leak of this wellhead over a mile under the Gulf of Mexico waters and designed, this report says, to keep hidden from the American public the full, and tragic, extent of this leak that is now estimated to be over 2.9 million gallons a day.

The dispersal agent Corexit 9500 is a solvent originally developed by Exxon and now manufactured by the Nalco Holding Company of Naperville, Illinois that is four times more toxic than oil (oil is toxic at 11 ppm (parts per million), Corexit 9500 at only 2.61ppm). In a report written by Anita George-Ares and James R. Clark for Exxon Biomedical Sciences, Inc. titled “Acute Aquatic Toxicity of Three Corexit Products: An Overview” Corexit 9500 was found to be one of the most toxic dispersal agents ever developed. Even worse, according to this report, with higher water temperatures, like those now occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, its toxicity grows.

-SNIP
A greater danger involving Corexit 9500, and as outlined by Russian scientists in this report, is that with its 2.61ppm toxicity level, and when combined with the heating Gulf of Mexico waters, its molecules will be able to “phase transition” from their present liquid to a gaseous state allowing them to be absorbed into clouds and allowing their release as “toxic rain” upon all of Eastern North America. (more at link)

http://current.com/news/92463025_toxic-oil-spill-rains-warned-could-destroy-north-america.htm

[GodlessBiker]

3. I think the alarmist statements are appropriate. A disaster does not have to threaten...

the entire planet for people to be apoplectic, particularly when, as Rachel Madow pointed out last night, so much more can be done to stop some of the effects.

[MineralMan]

5. I'm alarmed too, for the affected areas.

A number of OPs here and posts within threads, however, are calling this a global disaster. It is nothing of the sort. It is a local or perhaps regional disaster. I made it clear that I see this as a very bad thing, but wanted to put it in a global perspective to counter the EOTWAWKI claims being made by some.

[LeftyFingerPop]

4. However, the real question shoud be...

What happens if 50 % of the world's oceans are even slightly contaminated?

25% ?

1% ?

.1% ?

.001% ?

.000001% ?

Oil to water ratio does not have to be 1:1 in any given area for ecosystem death to occur. It is something far, far less than that.

[MineralMan]

6. Well, the oceans are already "slightly" contaminated.

That's pretty general. This won't add appreciably to it, except in the Gulf and, perhaps, part of our Atlantic Coast. Beyond that, it won't be detectable. There are limits to how far this oil is going to travel.

Remember, I'm not saying it's not a terrible thing. It is. I'm just providing perspective. Facts are good.

[LeftyFingerPop]

11. Your statements are opinions, not facts.

"This won't add appreciably to it, except in the Gulf and, perhaps, part of our Atlantic Coast. Beyond that, it won't be detectable".

The fact is...we just don't know yet. I have been arguing since day 1 on this board that the amount of released oil being announced is far less than the truth. I have so far been proven correct. As it stands now, the slick that we can see is the size of New York State. Even computer models disagree on how far this oil will travel.

These are facts.

Also, "just" impacting the Gulf and Atlantic coast will have untold impact on the ecosystem. it is not just a matter of water and oil volume.

[DURHAM D]

16. + 1000 nt

[hlthe2b]

19. yup

[MineralMan]

31. The statements below the data are opinion. You are correct.

The data are the data.

[depakid]

8. You're assuming that a relief well will work- and the oil flow will slow substantially or cease

I'm not making that assumption.

In the more than seven weeks since its deep-sea well exploded and began belching oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico, all BP has done is make the leak worse....

"...It is quite feasible that whatever the oil is doing now, which we think is really bad, could be the good time," said Ira Liefer, a researcher at the Marine Science Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is also a member of the federal study group trying to determine the daily flow from the leak.

Liefer's overriding concern is that the lack of accurate measurements of flow and pressure is leading to bad choices by those trying to plug the leak. "It's being done without any numbers," he told the Huffington Post. "That's not how you do science. The problem here is a rush to solve the problems without getting some numbers so it can be done safely, and as a result, making it worse."

The latest series of estimates from the various teams of scientists trying to determine the flow rate, while higher than they had been previously, are also conflicting, range widely, and may still be too low. The government is now estimating that the flow -- before the riser was cut June 3 -- was somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 barrels a day.

And yet, even with about 15,000 barrels of oil a day are being captured by the new cap, the roiling cloud of filth captured on live video appears undiminished.

Liefer said that if engineers had known just how forcefully the oil was shooting out of the reservoir, they would not have attempted the "top kill," because they would have known it wouldn't work. Instead, the procedure effectively "sandblasted the inside of the pipe," he said. "If they'd left it clogged and messy and then cut it, then less would have come out of it."

Cutting the kinked riser pipe also undoubtedly increased the flow of oil, though by how much is another mystery.

And drilling the relief wells is anything but a surefire solution, Liefer said. Even if a relief well bore is able to connect up with the original, that could backfire -- either literally, by causing another explosion (as recently happened with a relief well in Australia), or figuratively, if the structural integrity of the rock above the reservoir has been undermined.

Liefer's worst-case scenario is that something BP does (or has already done) will destroy the well's structural integrity in a way that the oil and gas from the reservoir deep below starts to break out either in a massive rupture that spews out "a billion gallons in a month" -- or through widespread fractures in the seabed. "That could go on for year and years," Liefer said.

"At some point," he said. "it's at the point where everything's dead."

"It's been failure after failure after failure, so far," said Rick Steiner, a marine scientist consulting with Greenpeace.

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/11/gulf-oil-spill-bps-poor-r_n_608114.html

[MineralMan]

9. I'm assuming nothing. I'm presenting some data that puts

the Gulf and what's going on in it into some global perspective. Your argument is not with me.

I'm hopeful about the relief well and the killing of this well. I wouldn't say I'm optimistic.

[depakid]

15. I understand and appreciate that

Thanks for the material.

Trouble is, we're quite literally in uncharted waters ecologically- and in terms of engineering.

[backscatter712]

23. The relief well is the only thing we've got with workable physics to help us.

The top-hat, junk-shot, top-kill techniques were all doomed from the start because the pumps and equipment, hooked to that damaged BOP, could not generate enough force to overcome the thousands of psi of pressure coming out of the well.

With the relief well, we've got gravity on our side. The plan's simple. Drill deep, then slant-drill until you intersect the original well 15,000 feet under the sea bed, then pump in extra-heavy kill mud. The force of gravity will ensure that the mud goes down the relief well, then get in the original well, get pushed up by the pressure until there's a big-ass column of mud weighing many tons sitting on top of the oil.

It's like top-kill, but with gravity helping us. Which makes it the only technique we've got that can actually work. The drawback is that you're hitting a small target thousands of feet underground. It's been done before, multiple times, but frequently, relief wells miss the target. Which is why they've got two relief wells being drilled right now, though IMHO, with a 50% chance of a miss for each well (which would imply that the probability of success of one of the two current relief wells is 75%), we need to be drilling three or four relief wells, to bring the probability of success higher.

IIRC, the gusher off the Australian coast was finally stopped by a relief well, but it took multiple tries, and extra months, before they finally succeeded.

[flamingdem]

27. I agree about the relief wells being an uncertainty. They are touted as the solution

but it's 50/50 at best.

They need to be building more relief wells, imo, and coming up with other ideas.

Why aren't they doing it: $$ cheap - or they don't believe it them anyway.

That means it continues to run and the OP is dead wrong. This will be enormous.

[thecrow]

10. Get back to us in about 10 months

and tell us then.
Meanwhile it is a disaster of previuosly unheard of proportions.

[MineralMan]

32. Well, I'll be here during those 10 months, too,

so you can count on it.

[freespeechtv]

12. One thing alarmist statements do is mobilize a highly apathetic population...

...even if it does make us all look like uninformed armchair idiots (which, let's face it, most of us are). It also highlights shortfalls and oversights in gov't regulation of out of control, you're-not-the-boss-of-me corporations. An accurate perspective is always a good thing to have, but right now, would "appearing informed" be helpful? Would we lose momentum if we wrote the spill off as "not as bad as everyone makes it out to be?" There are certainly worse spills occurring in other, more ecologically sensitive parts of the world, after all. Maybe we need the pendulum to swing so far to open our eyes to a very deep-rooted problem.

[Lochloosa]

13. Come on down to Florida and walk the 2276 miles of Tidal Shorelines with me

Then tell me the "effects will be limited". BS

[hlthe2b]

17. Ahh, the "dilution effect" argument of the Right Wing...

I'm not accusing you, MM of being a RWer, but this is their argument. To which I would respond to you, that 1. the mitigation is NOT simply a matter of dilution and the problems compound, depending on the ecology; 2. Time will tell... there is no clear path to stopping this inundation;

Bottom line, this is an unprecedented disaster,one that continues to unfold, and the extent which may not be known for years...

[mod mom]

18. "We do not need to blow it completely out of proportion"

Let me guess....we need to de-regulate further the oil industry?

:eyes:

[MineralMan]

30. Nope. I have said numerous times in threads on this that I want

all deep ocean drilling stopped completely. I want the oil industry monitored continuously, with those monitoring personnel having the power to stop everything at any time. I want a serious Mrs. Grundy from the EPA, who is fully trained and well-paid, on every rig, 24/7, with the power to shut it down at any time.

I wrote this to put those statistics up. My comments are being misinterpreted, I'm afraid, so that means I didn't explain myself well enough.

[DURHAM D]

20. Ok - who hired you?

I get the message: I will keep paying my bills. I will pay my mortgage. I will go shopping for a new car. I will not cancel my vacation plans at the coast.

ALL IS WELL.

THANK YOU.

what a relief...

[MineralMan]

33. Nobody hired me. I haven't worked for anyone but myself since

1974. I'm not available.

[blindpig]

21. Talk to us in a year

You don't know what you're talking about either and are sounding like Tony Hayward. We'll have no idea until it is plugged and things play out, but every day it flows worse situations become more likely. Also, the massive use of dispersants is a gray area that looks anything but good.

One thing that is clear is that situations like this will occur again as long as profits are the motivator of the operators.

Kill Capitalism

[Dappleganger]

25. Well said. nt

[backscatter712]

22. Good perspective.

This is an utter catastrophe, costing jobs and untold economic damage for people living on the Gulf Coast, and it's a horrific ecological disaster.

But it's not unprecedented, and one that we can recover from.

[MineralMan]

34. That was my only point. Thanks for reading the whole thing.

[The Midway Rebel]

24. The GoM is home to 5 species of rare or endangered sea turtles.

I suppose the world won't end if we lose a few of those species, it won't "ruin the planet", as you said.

As endangered, threatened and rare sea turtles go however, I doubt they are comforted by your reassuring math exercise here.

Frankly , niether am I.

[blindpig]

29. For Kemps Ridley Sea Turtles it's about all thet got.

That shit is covering up a good portion of their most important feeding grounds. I fear that the species may not recover from this.

Kill Capitalism

[Javaman]

26. Please define "Limited"

limited in area contaminated? Limited to how much of the ecosystem is destroyed? Limited to the financial and economical destruction to the gulf?

Yeah, it's just limited to the gulf beaches, fishing industry, ancillary industries, wet lands for the foreseeable several generations, many of Florida's east coast beaches, up the eastern seaboard beaches and a few newly created dead zones.

Just that. Yeah, it's limited.

:eyes:

[Individualist]

35. 6. The Gulf of Mexico opens into the Atlantic Ocean.

Limited? :crazy: