Gulf coast oil spill

[casimendocina]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

Well, crap. That's gonna make a mess.

I'd held off from reading/participating in this thread for all the usual reasons. Now after finally gathering the courage to have a look, I see that there was no need to.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by casimendocina

I'd held off from reading/participating in this thread for all the usual reasons. Now after finally gathering the courage to have a look, I see that there was no need to.

[HungLikeJesus]

I just had some shrimp for dinner at a local Mexican restaurant and wondered if they came from the Gulf.

[Clodfobble]

Oh, did they tell you that was mole sauce? Yeah, ah, about that...

[xoxoxoBruce]

Shrimp?

[classicman]

Until this week, it didn’t fit with the White House’s British-bashing script, either. In recent days, though, we have witnessed an extraordinary U-turn in America’s attitude towards the great spill.

It began when a respected Time magazine environmental writer voiced the near-heretical proposition: that the effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20 had been massively hyped.

His article was largely based on the opinions of Professor Ivan van Heerden, a brilliant but controversial marine scientist fired by Louisiana State University after publishing a book about Hurricane Katrina that said cataclysmic flooding was inevitable because the protection given to the coast was wholly inadequate.

He said: ‘There is just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster - although BP lied about the size of the oil spill, we’re not seeing catastrophic impacts.’



Emboldened by the academic’s willingness to go against the accepted wisdom, other leading scientists have concurred, with similar views being expressed in influential U.S. newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post.

It was against this background that the Obama administration made its own dramatic U-turn this week.

In a humiliating climb-down, it conceded in an official report from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that the ‘vast majority’ of the spilled oil had already gone.


The rest, it said, had probably diluted and didn’t appear to pose much of a threat.

According to 25 leading U.S. government and independent scientists, the feared catastrophe to the coast’s fragile ecosystem had been averted.

The cynical spin from Washington suggested that Obama had successfully browbeaten BP into mopping up its mess - with Mother Nature lending a helping hand.

Read more:

[ZenGum]

Good news and bad news, you can spin it however you want.

Good news: leak is stopped.

Bad news: lots of oil got out.

Good news: 75% of it has been dealt with by burning, skimming, dispersants, and mostly marine bacteria.

Bad news: The remaining 25% is still 5 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill.

Good news: Warm water and open beaches will handle that oil much better than the Alaskan environment did.

Bad news: All those oil eating bacteria also gobble up oxygen.

Good news: a few good hurricanes should slosh up the water and oxygenate it again.

Continue as needed until the next media frenzy gets started.

Hey everybody, look! Beyonce and Eminem are dating!

[classicman]

My bad then. I agree - I have been fishing as long as I've been alive. To see the massive declines is scary. The constant increases in restrictions on recreational fishermen is ridiculous when the commercial fishermen have virtually none.

[ZenGum]

Yeah, what we have done to global fish stocks is a #$%&ing disgrace. but, that's another thread.

[HungLikeJesus]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

Yeah, what we have done to global fish stocks is a #$%&ing disgrace. but, that's another thread.

I thought you said "global fish sticks."

They're my favorite.

[classicman]

got a link?

[ZenGum]

err, that would be another thread, if we ever make one.

I find that stuff too depressing. Hope jellyfish taste good.

[classicman]

They found oil in some crabs. Not good. Further testing to come.

[casimendocina]

The stuff on TV (at least what I saw on the Australian international news channel last night) with what I'm guessing are prominent people in the Florida community eating seafood and saying that it was all fine seemed so much like what happened with mad cow disease in the UK...I'm thinking here of a clip from Alain De Button's series based on his book the Consolations of Philosophy, the first episode on Socrates, which featured a UK politician eating a burger to show that it was all ok...which turned out to be not the whole truth.

[classicman]

To assess how heavy a blow the BP oil spill has dealt the Gulf of Mexico, researchers are closely watching a staple of the seafood industry and primary indicator of the ecosystem's health: the blue crab.

Weeks ago, before engineers pumped in mud and cement to plug the gusher, scientists began finding specks of oil in crab larvae plucked from waters across the Gulf coast.

The government said last week that three-quarters of the spilled oil has been removed or naturally dissipated from the water. But the crab larvae discovery was an ominous sign that crude had already infiltrated the Gulf's vast food web — and could affect it for years to come.

"It would suggest the oil has reached a position where it can start moving up the food chain instead of just hanging in the water," said Bob Thomas, a biologist at Loyola University in New Orleans. "Something likely will eat those oiled larvae ... and then that animal will be eaten by something bigger and so on."

Tiny creatures might take in such low amounts of oil that they could survive, Thomas said. But those at the top of the chain, such as dolphins and tuna, could get fatal "megadoses."

Marine biologists routinely gather shellfish for study. Since the spill began, many of the crab larvae collected have had the distinctive orange oil droplets, said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.

"In my 42 years of studying crabs I've never seen this," Perry said.

She wouldn't estimate how much of the crab larvae are contaminated overall, but said about 40 percent of the area they are known to inhabit has been affected by oil from the spill.

While fish can metabolize dispersant and oil, crabs may accumulate the hydrocarbons, which could harm their ability to reproduce, Perry said in an earlier interview with Science magazine.

She told the magazine there are two encouraging signs for the wild larvae — they are alive when collected and may lose oil droplets when they molt.

Link

Pretty crazy the way mother nature can adapt. Lets hope that she can in this situation as well.