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Gulf Undersea Oil Plume Now Obliterated by Nature
 Wonder how the Bambi Admin will try to spin this to their benefit (and the Gulf states' detriment)?The Gulf of Mexico's undersea oil plume is no more. For nearly a month, scientists sampling the site of a deepwater plume stretching southwest from BP PLC's failed well in the Gulf have been foiled. Their sensors have gone silent. Where once a vibrant -- if diffuse -- cloud of oil stretched for miles, 3,600 feet below the surface, there is now only ocean, and what seems to be the debris of a bacterial feeding frenzy. "For the last three weeks, we haven't been able to detect the deepwater plume at all," said Terry Hazen, a microbiologist and oil spill expert at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who has had a clutch of researchers monitoring the Gulf since late May. So for all of August, it's been gone? Cue the conspiracy theorists.... The disappearance is backed up by government sampling data. The plume is simply gone. And Hazen knows why. "This all fits with the fact that the bugs have degraded the oil," he said. Despite press accounts to the contrary, Now there's a shocker! The MSM lied to us? Hooda thunk it? the disappearance of this deepwater oil plume, whose midsummer existence was detailed last week by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is far from a shock, at least to scientists. Undersea bacteria -- the single-cell janitors of the marine world -- along with currents and diffusion likely combined to degrade or isolate the dispersed oil to undetectable levels, Hazen said. The likely source . . . is a previously undiscovered, cold-loving microbe that surged in response to the plume, a development Hazen details in a new study to be published later this week in the journal Science. It is the first peer-reviewed report to provide direct evidence of how undersea microbes responded to hydrocarbons in the Gulf's deep waters. "This enrichment of [cold-loving] petroleum degraders, with their rapid oil biodegradation rates, appears to be one of the major mechanisms behind the rapid disappearance of the deepwater dispersed oil plume," Hazen said. The particular bacteria identified by Hazen are perfectly adapted for the Gulf's deep waters, which sit under high pressure and remain cold, hovering around 5 degrees Celsius, despite their near-tropical locale. "They actually degrade oil faster at 5 degrees than they do at 20 degrees," Hazen said. While it can be difficult to accept, if there is one disaster the Gulf is poised to handle, it is a leak of its own light crude, Hazen added. The bacteria have had millions of years to adapt to the oil, the petroleum itself is light and readily degraded and, in the plumes at least, the oil was already in low concentrations. Hazen's study may finally raise public awareness that oil spills nearly always trigger substantial microbial hydrocarbon degradation, a fact that is too frequently ignored in initial responses, Timmis said. Future strategies to deal with oil spills must fully integrate measures to harness the microbial capacity to remove hydrocarbons, he said Pretty good article - scientific but accessible. Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2010-08-24 |
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