Researchers Warning That Spill Bigger Mess Than Gov't Claims
SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
POSTED: 6:07 pm CDT August 17, 2010
UPDATED: 7:02 am CDT August 18, 2010
WASHINGTON -- Researchers are warning
that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is a bigger mess than the government
claims and that a lot of crude is lurking deep below the surface, some
of it settling perhaps in a critical undersea canyon off the Florida
Panhandle. The evidence of microscopic amounts of oil mixing into the soil of the canyon was gathered by scientists at the
University
of South Florida, who also found poisoned plant plankton - the vital
base of the ocean food web - which they blamed on a toxic brew of oil
and dispersants. Their work is preliminary, hasn't
been reviewed by other scientists, requires more tests to confirm it is
BP's oil they found, and is based on a 10-day research cruise that ended
late Monday night. Scientists who were not involved said they were
uncomfortable drawing conclusions based on such a brief look.
But those early findings follow a report on Monday from
Georgia researchers that said as much as 80 percent of the oil from the
spill remains in the Gulf. Both groups' findings have already been
incorporated into
lawsuits filed against BP.
Both groups paint a darker scenario than that of federal
officials, who two weeks ago announced that most of the oil had
dissolved, dispersed or been removed, leaving just a bit more than a
quarter of the amount that spewed from the well that exploded in April.
At the White House on Aug. 4, National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco said: "At least 50
percent of the oil that was released is now completely gone from the
system, and most of the remainder is degrading rapidly or is being
removed from the beaches." That's not what the scientists from South Florida and Georgia found.
"The oil is not gone, that's for sure," University of
South Florida's David Hollander said Tuesday. "There is oil and we need
to deal with it."
University of Georgia's
Samantha Joye said: "It's a tremendous amount of oil that's in the
system. ... It's very difficult for me to imagine that 50 percent of it
has been degraded." Marine scientist Chuck
Hopkinson, also with the University of Georgia, raised the obvious
question: "Where has all the oil gone? It hasn't gone anywhere. It still
lurks in the deep." NOAA spokesman Justin Kenney
defended his agency's calculations, saying they are "based on direct
measurements whenever possible and the best available scientific
estimates where direct measurements were not possible." But the vast
majority of it is based on "educated scientific guesses," because unless
the oil was being burned or skimmed, measurements weren't possible,
NOAA response scientist Bill Lehr said earlier this month.
What is happening in the Gulf is the outcome of a decision made
early on in the fighting of the spill: to use dispersants to keep the
surface and beaches as clean as possible, at the expense of keeping oil
stuck below the surface, said Monty Graham, a researcher at the Dauphin
Island Sea Lab in Alabama who was not part of the latest work. Oil
degrades far more slowly in cooler, deeper waters than it would at the
surface. At the surface and the top 100 feet or so,
it is obvious why oil is harmful, fouling marshes and hampering sea
turtles, fish, birds and other life. Deep down, the effects are subtler,
less direct. Oil at that depth can chip away at the base of the food
web - plant plankton - and that could cause animals to go hungry.
Reduced oxygen levels from natural gas and oil could also starve
creatures of oxygen. At depths of 900 to 3,300 feet,
the University of South Florida researchers found problems with plant
plankton. About two-fifths of the samples showed "some degree of
toxicity." "We found general phytoplankton health to
be poor," Hollander said. By comparison, in non-oiled southern parts of
the Gulf, the plant plankton were healthy, researchers said.
That makes sense because past research has shown that when oil
when gets into the cell membranes of plankton, it causes all sorts of
problems, said Paul Falkowski, a marine scientist at Rutgers University
who was not part of the research. However, he said plant plankton don't
live long anyway. They have about a week's lifespan, he said, and in a
few months this insult to the base of the food web could be history. Still, the brew that is poisoning the plankton may linger and no one knows for how long, Hollander said.
The Florida researchers used ultraviolet light to
illuminate micro-droplets of oil deep underwater. When they did that,
"it looked like a constellation of stars," Hollander said.
He also found the oil deposited in the sea bottom near the edges
of the significant DeSoto Canyon, about 40 miles southwest of Panama
City, Fla., suggesting oil may have settled into that canyon. The canyon
is an important mixing area for cold, nutrient-laden water and warmer
surface water. It is also key for currents and an important fisheries
area. "Clearly the oil down in the abyss, there's
nothing we can do about it," said Ed Overton of Louisiana State
University. He said the environment at the surface or down to 100 feet
or so is "rapidly going back to normal," with shrimpers starting their
harvest. But oil below 1,000 feet degrades much more slowly, he said.
Joye has measured how fast natural gas, which also spewed
from the BP well, can degrade in water, and it may take as much as 500
days for large pools to disappear at 3,000 feet below the sea. That
natural gas starves oxygen from the water, she said. "You're talking about a best-case situation of a year's turnover time," Joye said. ___ AP legal affairs reporter Curt Anderson in Miami contributed to this report. ___ Online: University of Georgia's oil spill page: http://oilspill.uga.edu
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