Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf
Jim Wilson/The New York TimesSecretary of the Interior Ken Salazar visited a wildlife treatment center in Louisiana on Saturday.
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: May 15, 2010
Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
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“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”
The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.
Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”
The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.
Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.
BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”
The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.
The scientists on the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans, are not certain why that would be. They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly.
BP said Saturday at a briefing in Robert, La., that it had resumed undersea application of dispersants, after winning Environmental Protection Agency approval the day before.
“It appears that the application of the subsea dispersant is actually working,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said Saturday. “The oil in the immediate vicinity of the well and the ships and rigs working in the area is diminished from previous observations.”
Many scientists had hoped the dispersants would cause oil droplets to spread so widely that they would be less of a problem in any one place. If it turns out that is not happening, the strategy could come under greater scrutiny. Dispersants have never been used in an oil leak of this size a mile under the ocean, and their effects at such depth are largely unknown.
Much about the situation below the water is unclear, and the scientists stressed that their results were preliminary. After the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, they altered a previously scheduled research mission to focus on the effects of the leak.
Interviewed on Saturday by satellite phone, one researcher aboard the Pelican, Vernon Asper of the University of Southern Mississippi, said the shallowest oil plume the group had detected was at about 2,300 feet, while the deepest was near the seafloor at about 4,200 feet.
“We’re trying to map them, but it’s a tedious process,” Dr. Asper said. “Right now it looks like the oil is moving southwest, not all that rapidly.”
He said they had taken water samples from areas that oil had not yet reached, and would compare those with later samples to judge the impact on the chemistry and biology of the ocean.
While they have detected the plumes and their effects with several types of instruments, the researchers are still not sure about their density, nor do they have a very good fix on the dimensions.
Given their size, the plumes cannot possibly be made of pure oil, but more likely consist of fine droplets of oil suspended in a far greater quantity of water, Dr. Joye said. She added that in places, at least, the plumes might be the consistency of a thin salad dressing.
Dr. Joye is serving as a coordinator of the mission from her laboratory in Athens, Ga. Researchers from the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi are aboard the boat taking samples and running instruments.
Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome, since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the plumes.
While the oxygen depletion so far is not enough to kill off sea life, the possibility looms that oxygen levels could fall so low as to create large dead zones, especially at the seafloor. “That’s the big worry,” said Ray Highsmith, head of the Mississippi center that sponsored the mission, known as the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology.
The Pelican mission is due to end Sunday, but the scientists are seeking federal support to resume it soon.
“This is a new type of event, and it’s critically important that we really understand it, because of the incredible number of oil platforms not only in the Gulf of Mexico but all over the world now,” Dr. Highsmith said. “We need to know what these events are like, and what their outcomes can be, and what can be done to deal with the next one.”
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3 Bad-to-Worse Scenarios
Scientists have been predicting calamity for the Gulf Coast ever since theDeepwater Horizon oil rig blew up on April 20. But until the oil arrived at Louisiana's front door, the true potential of the disaster-in-the-making was difficult to gauge. Now, the possible outcomes for the area's delicate estuaries -- nursery to one of the most abundant fish, bird and animal populations in the world -- are coming into sharper focus. Even the best-case scenario is far from good. Ron Kendall, who heads the Department of Environmental Toxicology at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, calls what is about to occur "the biggest ecological toxicology experiment in the country's history." Here are three ways it could play out. The Bad-But-Less-Than-Doomsday Scenario If there's a glimmer of hope for coastal Louisiana, it comes from test results on oil samples taken from the spill. "The good news is that the oil appears to be relatively nontoxic," Irving Mendelssohn, a Louisiana State University professor who specializes in wetlands plants, told AOL News. "So if this was a one-time event, if the oil went into the marsh once, I wouldn't expect much of an effect on the vegetation. The leaves and shoots will die, and new leaves and shoots will grow back," he said.Denise Reed, interim director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, also sees some cause for optimism. "The wetlands have a remarkable ability to survive," she said.
But minimizing the marshes' exposure depends on BP quickly finding a way to stanch the flow of oil,which of course is far from certain. And even if that were to happen, neither the fish, bivalves and wildlife that call the waters home, nor the men and women of Louisiana's $2-billion-a-year commercial fishing industry, will be similarly spared. The slick is hitting at the worst possible time of year. It's nesting season for birds and animals and spawning season for fish. What's more, while mildly oil-soaked plants can rebound, seafood has no such margin for error, as oysterman George Barisich knows all too well. When Hurricane Katrina roared through in 2005, Barisich, 54, lost three of his boats and all but 40 of the nearly 400 acres leased from the state in St. Bernard Parish. He measures his financial loss in the past five years at $750,000. By this spring, he'd rebuilt 160 acres for farming oysters. Now his beds are in the path of oil, and he figures he's on the edge of going out of business again."The quantity, concentration and duration of the oil will determine the mortality," Barisich told AOL News. "But basically, we're screwed." The Even-Scarier Scenario The risks to the Louisiana shoreline are compounded by the shape they were in before the Deepwater disaster. The state has 40 percent of the coastal wetlands in the continental U.S., according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, but they are disappearing at a rate of 25 square miles a year. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita alone took out 200 square miles in 2005, notes Reed. Tiny marsh islands in Terrebonne Bay and Barataria Bay have vanished so recently that they still appear on navigation charts. Barisich said islands that he used to anchor on he now catches oysters on. They're five feet underwater.NOAA forecasters had hoped the oil would keep to the east of the Mississippi River, held back by the strong river current emptying into the gulf. Instead, the oil is creeping steadily into areas that have suffered nearly 60 percent of the coastal land loss.
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"If a marsh is healthy, it will bounce back," Reed said. "But where some marshes are already stressed, this could be the last straw that pushes it over the edge. Once you lose the vegetation, it's gone. Gone to open water." The longer it takes BP to shut off the oil, the more marshland subjected to that fate. "If this oil spill keeps going, you could get multiple coatings of shoots and leaves. If this happens two or three times, then the total plant will die, and there will be no regeneration," said Mendelssohn. And when marsh grass dies, there's nothing left to hold the soil together. "We've never had this kind of event that I'm aware of, where we've had 21 days of oil release like this. This creates a whole new playing field," he said. The So-Bad-It-Will-Be-Felt-for-Generations Scenario In less than three weeks, a new, unpredictable and potentially ruinous variable will be added to that field when hurricane season officially begins June 1. Texas Tech's Kendall puts it plainly: "If a hurricane rolls up the gulf, we'll be sweeping oil out of downtown New Orleans."Southeast of the city, Barisich thinks, it could take even less to swamp low-lying St. Bernard Parish with tar balls. "I pray to God we can stop it. But if we get a storm surge -- it doesn't have to be a hurricane -- this oil is going to go over the marsh and go way inland. Once it gets up into Shell Beach on Lake Borgne, we're done."As of this afternoon, the oil was still a long way from that tiny fishing community, but plenty close enough to inspire dread. At Breton Sound Marina, which overlooks Bayou la Lourtre near Hopedale, owner Glenn Sanchez keeps a before-and-after map at his desk showing what the area suffered at the hands of Katrina. "Whenever I go through my little spiel, people just can't believe what we've lost," he said. He thinks the damage from the oil spill will be even worse. "Depending on how bad it comes in, it could be from five to 20 years. This will destroy a whole culture," he said. "I might be out of business. I'm 55 years old. I don't have any idea where I'd go to try and find a job."Louis Molero Jr., 47, a third-generation fisherman, lives in the 100-year-old cypress house his grandfather bought in 1916. Until last month, he was a shrimper. Now he lays boom for BP and waits."My son told me the other day, This could go into duck hunting season. I'm not thinking that far ahead. What I'm thinking now is: How am I gonna pay my bills?"I'm used to dealing with hurricanes," Molero added. "They come. They're gone. This is a totally different thing. What is the long-term effect? Is it going to kill the fish and the oysters and the shrimp? Are we out for years?"Travis Holeman, a fishing guide and charter captain, thinks that may be what will happen. "Fishing stocks take a long time to recover," he said. He has already started scouting out new places to guide his clients -- in Argentina. "You'll have third-, fourth- and fifth-generation fishermen who will have been thrust into poverty for the rest of their lives," he said. "Most of the people in their 50s will never see this in its heyday again. They've already had their prime fishing time. It's over."