Oil Spill Update: May 31st 2010

Via the Daily What
The newest update is that British Petroleum’s ‘top kill’ (animation, description from engineers) and ‘junk shot’ will join ‘top hat’ in the list of failed attempts. Early news of the ‘top kill” teetered for a few days between progress, stopping of the leak, progress, hesitation, and failure with no one really knowing the answer until BP’s statement of failure yesterday.  With out further ado the news round for the last few days.

Illustration from NOAA: Take a guess on how may oil rigs exist in the Gulf of Mexico alone? Nearly 4000. All of them are regulated as well as BP's Deep Horizon.

Finally, I present this set of pictures.  After viewing them I didn’t know whether to weep or vomit.  And sometimes because you need to laugh to keep from crying…”You know what the say about the ocean, once it goes black it will never go back”.

11 Replies to “Oil Spill Update: May 31st 2010”

  1. Actually, a small and sad correction: it’s now 26% of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico EEZ as of 1800 tonight — see http://sero.nmfs.noaa.gov/ for the latest closure map.

    Good catch by SFScientist on the two new eras idea. Similarly, I’d also suggest that GOM and Florida Straits marine science in general will also likely see a “PS” and “AS” distinction, which might have some negative impacts for any graduate student or post-doc research now planned in those affected areas, unless you have access to pre-spill data for comparison.

  2. WOW! If we can drill why can’t we fix. I think the oil companies are really trying to save the oil first before stopping it.

  3. What would I do without Deep Sea News to keep me in the loop on this terrible catastrophe? *haz a sad*

    Oh, and that shark comic? Superb.

  4. My only hope now is that we can use this tragedy to force a real change. Remember ‘change’? The kind that ‘you can believe in’? I want it NOW. And I’m not talking about Obama’s quickstep reversal of his oil drilling policy, but the real deal. Massively reduced dependence on fossil fuels, foreign and domestic, is what I’m talkin’ ’bout.

  5. Now the oil spill sheen has moved within 7 miles of Pensacola Beach. Tar balls are out 10 miles. When oh when does this end??? People are sick, losing income and the environment, there is no measurement possible to know the infinite damage to marine and plant life and our Gulf waters. Let’s see what or if Florida does anything different since this is tied to tourism. The governor seems to focus on it more than anything else.

  6. I am BP federal agent, and we dont like this as much as you do. What happened in the Gulf was a terrible thing, but we need to keep our heads up and fight through this. We’re not bad people, we just made a terrible mistake. I take part in BP’s bioremediation (oil cleanip) and we are trying our very best to cleanup, and restore United State’s Coastline.

    Thank you,
    BP Bioremediation Agent

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