For more than three weeks now, crude oil has been erupting out of a pipe a mile underneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. A new analysis of seafloor video indicates that nearly 70,000 barrels could be gushing out every day, NPR reports. That figure is at least 10 times the U.S. Coast Guard's original estimate of the flow, and "the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez tanker every four days."
And nobody really knows where it is, or where it's headed.
...there's never been an oil spill this big and this deep before. Nor have authorities ever used chemical dispersants so widely.
link: Where's The Oil? Your Government Doesn't Really Know
Exactly. The seductive lure of dispersants is that they keep the oil out of sight - or nearly so - and, hopefully, off the beaches. And the birds. But nobody knows - certainly including that bastion of boundless optimism (oh go ahead and breathe, it won't kill you) the EPA - nobody knows, in an application this big (closing in on 500,000 gallons now) what harm the dispersants themselves (they are toxic chemicals) will do - or, for that matter, what the oil itself will do where it goes when it goes somewhere else.
"It's a trade-off, and no one will tell you using dispersants won't have an effect. You're trading one species for another," says Carys Mitchelmore, an environmental chemist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Solomons and a co-author on a 2005 US National Academies report on dispersants.
link: Nature News
Meanwhile:
Don't worry about that pesky oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP CEO Tony Hayward says: It's "relatively tiny" compared to the "very big ocean."
link: Huffington Post
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