oil spill
sastyk | May 20, 2010Russian TV offers a potential solution to close up the oil leak in the Gulf - nuclear explosions. And no, Stephen Colbert isn't going to pop out here - this is serious. Well, sorta.
As the reporter points out, the flora and fauna of the Gulf may not thank you. On the other hand, how often does one get to so perfectly set up the narrative of a 1950s bad sci fi film? I suspect the end result would be something like this:
(Image credit here)
Sharon
sastyk | May 20, 2010Thanks to fellow science blogger Ed Brayton for the link to this New York Times article, which suggests that because of ties to the company, BP chose to flood the Gulf with a dispersant that is both more toxic than many of the other options and also less effective.
So far, BP has told federal agencies that it has applied more than 400,000 gallons of a dispersant sold under the trade name Corexit and manufactured by Nalco Co., whose current leadership includes executives from BP and Exxon. And another 805,000 gallons of Corexit are on order, the company said, with the possibility that…
lborkowski | May 19, 2010It's only right that BP bear the cleanup costs in the Gulf - but their cleanup responsibilities shouldn't interfere with federal agencies doing their jobs. Two recent news accounts paint a disturbing picture of federal employees taking orders from the multinational corporation that's turned an already hard-hit part of our coastline into a disaster zone.
McClatchy Newspapers' Marisa Taylor and Renee Schoof report that BP has released little information about how much oil is gushing out of its damaged well, and it will not make public the results of air sampling for cleanup workers. As…
sastyk | May 17, 2010We still don't have the faintest idea how much oil is spewing out of the well in the Gulf. Nor do we have the faintest idea what the full environmental consequence of what may well be the biggest single-event human-caused. ecological disaster of all time (the very fact that I have to add the word "single-event" to that statement should tell you something). We know that it is almost certainly more than all the low estimates to date, and we know that the ecological consequences will be huge, lasting and we do not understand them.
That is, we know some of the potential effects, we know they…
rallain | May 15, 2010I was going to just leave the oil spill in the gulf topic alone. Not because it isn't important, obviously it is. Rather, I wasn't going to do anything because I didn't really have anything to add to the topic. After a couple of readers requested it, I think I do have something to add. How exactly do you estimate the amount of oil flowing into the gulf?
What do I have to start with? A video. Here is a video of the undersea oil leak.
Now, I am not the first to estimate the oil flow rate (NPR on Purdue Prof's estimation and here a commenter make a quick calculation). Like I said, I am…
dblum | May 7, 2010 Let's start with some slightly, okay, more than slightly depressing numbers: Since the devastating explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon rig almost three weeks ago, more than 1.7 million gallons of oil have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico and more than 250,000 gallons of chemical dispersant have been sprayed onto that spill in an effort to contain the damage.
Everyone agrees that it's the enormous slick of oil that we should really worry. But in the last week, questions have also been raised about the cleaning chemicals flooding into the Gulf. Although the amount pales, as they say,…
sastyk | April 29, 2010The news from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is not good. If the NOAA estimates are right about the size of the spill it could dwarf Exxon Valdez:
Over the last few days, estimates had held that the Gulf of Mexico oil spilling was leaking about 1,000 barrels, or 42,000 gallons, into the water each day--bad, but still not historically bad on a scale like the spill caused by the Exxon Valdez. Except now, after closer investigation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that oil company BP's estimate might in fact be five times too low.
Rear Adm. Mary Landry, the Coast Guard's…