Slime Highway

Caption: A layer of fluffy oil residue sits atop a sediment core taken from a site northeast of the blown-out BP wellhead












Bruce sends this (which Marguerite also mentioned several days ago on Facebook):

Samples taken from the seafloor near BP's blown-out wellhead indicate miles of murky, oily residue sitting atop hard sediment. Moreover, inside that residue are dead shrimp, zooplankton, worms and other invertebrates.

"I expected to find oil on the sea floor," Samantha Joye, a University of Georgia marine sciences professor, said Monday morning in a ship-to-shore telephone interview. "I did not expect to find this much. I didn't expect to find layers two inches thick."

The scientists aboard the research vessel Oceanus suspect it's all from the BP spill, but will have to wait until they return to shore this week to confirm it's the same oil source.

"It has to be a recent event," Joye said. "There's still pieces of warm bodies there."

If it is BP oil, it could undermine the federal government's estimate that 75 percent of the spill either evaporated, was cleaned up or was consumed by natural microbes.

I find all this very confusing. Oil doesn’t sink, and the dispersant Corexit acts as an emulsifier. In the same way globs of fat never settle out of milk, Corexit-treated oil should stay mixed in water for practically eternity, unless bacteria get to it first. That's why I expected oil everywhere on the East Coast by this time, but that horrible disaster did not happen.

Some other disaster happened instead - a disaster that we can't see because it all happened under the water's surface.

So, if oily stuff settles out on the ocean floor instead, then there is some other process going on that they don’t even understand. The stuff must floc on suspended sediment, or something, and sink. How odd is that? How do you make lightweight, hydrophobic oil sink? 'Cause it doesn't want to!

I knew that they wouldn’t like it when they finally figured out where all that oil went. Nevertheless, if one wanted to dump this staggering quantity of oil someplace where it would do the least amount of damage, this kind of slimy abyssal mat is the least-worst place to do it. At least a big chunk of the oil is not in mixed into shallower, continental-shelf sediment, where the damage to shrimp and oysters could be profound.

So, in a way, under severe pressure, BP may have made the correct decision to ignore EPA and everybody else and do what they wanted. They minimized the shallow-water environmental damage, making a catastrophic situation merely really, really bad.

I wonder if this fluffy stuff migrates? Maybe the real disaster is still unfolding.

If only they had capped the oil well sooner.

Bastards.