Oil Spill - Page 15

According to the latest numbers from the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, 597 dead oiled birds had been recovered along the gulf coast by June 6, nearly seven weeks after the accident that set the Deepwater Horizon spill in motion. Many of them await lab testing to determine if BP's oil caused their deaths.


this is nowhere near the "hundreds of thousands" that were expected.........

as bad as it is, the word will recover....

How many since June 6th?  That's not even close to being a current bit of news Sitasmom!

This just began,
no one really knows what is to come, not even the experts.

Recover is the wrong word to use, this will change everything it touches, life will adapt or it will perish.
What remains will not be the same as before.

Someone recently told me I can't stop progress, they are correct.
It will be our undoing on it's own, and much will be lost.
It cannot be stopped by man. 

Nature will decide when it's had enough.
Man will either adapt or perish along with everything else living on this planet.

Moons.

the experts say anything that will get their faces on stupid videos...............

oil is a natural substance, mother earth knows how do deal with it

and she is even as you panic!

Can you say illegal over use of oil dispersents? Gee no wonder BP wanted to make a big deal about those aerial photo's just so they could  exclaim, ... HEY LOOK!  No surface oil, everybody! Things must be okee dokie from here on end!

Experts from all sides sitasmom,
they all agree this is a living experiment, a learning experience.
The first of it's kind.

It is not crude oil any longer, now it is something else.
Not natural, but man made.

Mother Nature always has to (deal with it), and one way of dealing with it is things die.
They may be replaced by something else, but dead is dead, extinct, never to return.

We are all in the food chain, all things are connected.

If they get this thing sealed correctly and the sea floor doesn't rupture, the source of the problem will be stopped.
The effects will be the subject of much study for generations to come.
It's not over by a damned sight.

Most of what I saw today on the news was double talk, in time more facts will come forward, usually twenty five or thirty years if history is an indicator.

No matter what is discovered nothing will change until there is no other way.

Business as usual is ready to resume.

Moons.

Lessons From The Horizon Blowout: More Hype Than Harm

Only two weeks after BP began capping the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout, people have begun to ask, "Where's the oil?" The fact that skimmer ships sent out to clean the water of oil are unable to find oil to clean is leading the mainstream media to question whether environmentalists tried to exploit this unfortunate event by making it seem worse than it really was for political reasons, says H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis.

Fortunately, the damage from the spill is proving far less than the frightful claims of environmentalists, says Burnett:

The Horizon blowout has killed far less than 1 percent of the number of birds killed by the Exxon Valdez spill.

And while we've heard horror stories and seen pictures of oil-coated marine mammals, it turns out to be the same pictures shown over and over again since wildlife response teams have only collected three visibly oil-coated dead mammals thus far.

It's true that about 350 acres of Louisiana's valuable coastal marshes have been soaked by oil; however, this is far less than the 15,000 acres of wetlands lost each year in no small part because of federal programs.

Despite the spill, the region's fish and shrimp have tested clean, prompting the gradual lifting of the harsh restrictions that had shut down the fishing and shrimping industries.

Environmentalists hyped the spill in an attempt to push the Senate to pass the largest energy tax in history. Though the Senate's energy bill had nothing to do with the safety of offshore oil rigs, the green lobby tried to link the two in the public's mind. Fortunately, neither the public nor, ultimately, many senators were buying it, says Burnett.

Unfortunately, environmentalists were successful in convincing the Obama administration to shut down new offshore oil and gas production after the spill. This was despite that fact that the scientific panel that President Obama appointed to recommend a response said that a moratorium was unjustified and could make a bad situation worse, says Burnett.

Source: H. Sterling Burnett, "Lessons from the Horizon blowout: More hype than harm," The Hill, August 5, 2010.


http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-a-environment/112607-lessons-from-the-horizon-blowout-more-hype-than-harm

It's always politics isn't it........lol

Where is all that oil?

You need to find some new sources SM.



Moons.

HOMER- The Exxon Valdez oil spill killed more sea birds than any oil spill in history, according to a study by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists.

The new study estimates the total number of birds killed at between 90,000 and 270,000. About 30,000 sea birds killed by the oil spill were recovered last summer, the biologists concluded. They said that represents between 10 percent and 30 percent of the total dead.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That would be in between 900 and 2,700 birds that have died, while that seems like a bunch, its nothing compared to what the hurricane did!

So far I've only seen the same old photos over and over again, and i heard the other day the indeed the shrimpers and fishers are being allowed to do their work again. I am in contact with wild life rehabilitators who are on the scene and they are being paid well by BP do sit on their butts and play cards.

While 350 acres of marches are oil soaked, its really not all that huge of an area...... Its equal to just over a half mile square  (0.546 square mile). This is most definitely fixable.

While this whole incident is horrible, ...........................the sky is not falling, the wold will heal.....

latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-oil-bacteria-20100825,0,3721862.story

latimes.com
Bacteria seem to be doing a good cleanup job in gulf
Data collected months ago show populations of carbon-eating bacteria rising in parts of a plume of oil. Now, in the area where the bugs were collected, scientists 'do not see detectable oil.'
By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times

August 25, 2010

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As efforts continue to clean the oil that gushed from the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico, a team of scientists has found that nature's microbial helpers are hard at work too — and doing a better job than researchers had expected.

Data collected in May and June showed populations of carbon-eating bacteria were increasing in parts of a plume of oil drifting in deep water in the gulf, said lead author Terry Hazen, head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's ecology department.

"Within the last few weeks we've gone back and can find bacteria … but do not see detectable oil," Hazen said. The most likely reason, he added, is that the voracious bugs ate it.

Now, he said, "since they no longer have the oil, they're eating their [dead] brethren."

The study, published online Tuesday in the journal Science, examined the deep-sea plume of oil 3,600 feet below the surface and up to six miles from the leaking wellhead. The scientists scooped seawater from different points within the plume as well as outside of it.

They assessed the mass of bacteria in their samples several ways: by counting cells under microscopes; measuring how much oxygen was depleted from the water, a sign of active microbial life; and by measuringchemicals called phospholipids (found in bacterial cell membranes).

The researchers also used DNA analysis to identify the types of bacteria they found.

Bacterial populations were low outside the plume, Hazen said, but were 100 times denser in oily areas. Within those prospering colonies, the bacteria that dominated were bugs that had genes for consuming oil.

The DNA of one particular carbon-eater — closely related to a group of bacteria called Oceanospirillales — was found in just 5% of the bugs in a control sample of unpolluted seawater, but more than 90% of the plume-dwelling populations.

Before the experiment was over it was clear the bacteria were prodigious oil-eaters, Hazen said. Even though the team sent seawater samples for analysis as fast as they could — Fed-Exing the bottled bacteria in ice-stuffed coolers —bacteria in some samples managed to munch through all the oil before they got to the lab.

But though it would be heartening to think that the bacteria had digested all the oil, Richard Camilli, an oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said it was also possible that that the oil plume had moved or diluted to a point beyond detection.

"It becomes more difficult to find the plume after you've turned off the source," said Camilli, who led a study published last week in Science that found the oil plume was 22 miles long when it was mapped in June. He compared it to "a train that's leaving the station."

Camilli said the new study showed the bacteria weren't severely depleting the oxygen in the water. Thus, they were unlikely to create any "dead zones" — ocean regions where marine life cannot flourish — around the gulf's fisheries.

But the study also showed the bacteria preferred to eat certain hydrocarbons in the oil — short-chain alkanes — over others. This suggested that long-chain molecules, including some of the more damaging hydrocarbons, would not disappear as quickly, Camilli said.