Sunday, June 20, 2010

It may say he's vacationing on a luxury yacht, but he's really chilling at a throatwarber mangrove

While Tony Hayward went off to a Yacht Race (no, not kidding) BP has found other crimes to commit.

When the weather is calm and the sea is placid, ships trailing fireproof booms corral the black oil, the coated seaweed and whatever may be caught in it, and torch it into hundred-foot flames, sending plumes of smoke skyward in ebony mushrooms. This patch of unmarked ocean gets designated over the radio as "the burn box."...

By unhappy coincidence, the same convergences of ocean currents that create long mats of sargassum — nurturing countless crabs, slugs and surface fish that are crucial food for turtles, birds and larger fish — also coalesce the oil, creating islands of death sometimes 30 miles long.

"Most of the Gulf of Mexico is a desert. Nothing out there to live on. It's all concentrated in these oases," Witherington said.

"Ordinarily, the sargassum is a nice, golden color. You shake it, and all kinds of life comes out: shrimp, crabs, worms, sea slugs. The place is really just bursting with life. It's the base of the food chain. And these areas we're seeing here by comparison are quite dead," he said.


And apparently even when you have a chance to save something, you get told on occasion to burn it.

A shrimp boat captain in Louisiana hired by BP was blocked from rescuing juvenile Kemp's ridleys that were covered in oil in the Gulf waters. He was captured on video saying that the turtles are being collected in the clean-up efforts and burned up like so much ocean debris with other marine life gathering along tide lines where oil also congregates.

5 comments:

Expat said...

MarkfromIreland has an interesting take on release of methane gas locked in ices under the sea floor and the damage that can be caused by the release into the ocean of those gases. Here is a video of such a blowout:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_wizz/3366989555

Notice the oil platform sink into the sea on the pontoon closest to the up-welling gas. Some researchers suggest that there are many fishing boats that have disappeared suddenly in the fishing grounds off the British Isles because of involvement in such a gas release, particularly if the boats are trawling, one such incident is reported here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1047249.stm

and:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s218210.htm

Notice the mixture of gas and water becomes unable to support the weight of a ship, and the ship disappears without a trace. There are many wrecks off the Irish coasts and depressions in the seabed like the one mentioned. Trawling is a recent development and dragging heavy doors across the sea-floor may have disturbed the frozen gasses in the sea-bed.

If the Gulf well fails and collapses, and it well might, expect such a scenario developing.

StonyPillow, Yank Wog said...

The oil plume is fractionating as it hits the water. The dense gas phase (containing gasolines, light oils and methane) can have a specific gravity as low as 0.75, which means a ship would definitely sink. This would assume a localized heavy concentration of this phase at the surface, which also means it's in close proximity to the rig.

Of more immediate and generalized concern is the toxicity of methane-saturated water and its effect on the oxygen levels. This combines with the oxygen-stealing effect of bacterial breakdown of the oil to create a true dead zone in which all aquatic life is extinguished.

Hey BP, sorry we got our ecosystem in your oil. Pwease don't hit us again.

pansypoo said...

we can go all chinese on these assholes, right? RIGHT?!?

only driving to the mall matters.

Anonymous said...

Oh man, now I have that song in my head:

"Sashay, sashay through the sargassum. Stalking, skulking through the sargassum..."

Anonymous said...

Oh man, now I have that song in my head:

"Sashay, sashay through the sargassum. Stalking, skulking through the sargassum..."