Awaiting Disaster courtesy Quantum Physics (flickr)
The underwater gusher dropping 200,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day continues unabated, and the unprecedented nature of the incident, basically an undersea volcano spitting oil out from a mile deep, makes it impossible to predict when it will ever be mitigated.
The problem with the April 20 spill is that it isn't really a spill: It's a gush, like an underwater oil volcano. A hot column of oil and gas is spurting into freezing, black waters nearly a mile down, where the pressure nears a ton per inch, impossible for divers to endure. Experts call it a continuous, round-the-clock calamity, unlike a leaking tanker, which might empty in hours or days.
"Everything about it is unprecedented," said geochemist Christopher Reddy, an oil-spill expert and head of the Coastal Ocean Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "All our knowledge is based on a one-shot event…. With this, we don't know when it's going to stop." [...]
To BP falls the daunting task of trying to stop the gush before it becomes the most damaging spill in American history. If the flow is not stopped, it will exhaust the natural reservoir of oil beneath the sea floor, experts say. Many months, at least, could pass.
You can basically say goodbye to oil drilling in the Gulf at this point because it's about to all be gone, skimming to the surface and heading for shore. And this cleanup, far from the simple process claimed by shills for the oil industry, will take years if not decades.
rest http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/05/01/an-unfolding-catastrophe-in-the-gulf/
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