Majority of oil spilled in gulf unaccounted for

By Catholic Online
7/29/2010
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Four million barrels apparently vanished

It's been 100 days since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and collapsed, killing 11 crew members and setting off the United States' worst ever oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. A temporary cap to stop the leaking has apparently worked, and that was two weeks ago. The smoke has cleared . and a lot of the oil spill has not yet been accounted for. Officials say - where did it go?

Up to 4 million barrels or 167 million gallons, the vast majority of the spill inthe Gulf of Mexico, remains missing in government statistics.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - When the mile-deep BP well was capped on July 15, it had leaked out enough oil to fill the Pentagon more than 10 feet high. The gulf's total volume is about 880 million times the size of the Pentagon, although the oil's effects were concentrated in one corner of it.

Up to 4 million barrels or 167 million gallons, the vast majority of the spill, remains missing in government statistics. Some of it has been cleaned up by nature. Other amounts may be gone from the water -- but they could have taken on a second life as contaminants in the air, or in landfills around the Gulf Coast.

Scientists theorize that the oil is probably mixed with chemical dispersants - and "floating in underwater clouds," which one compared to a toxic fog.

"That stuff's somewhere," James H. Cowan Jr., a professor at Louisiana State University says. His research has shown concentrations of oil still floating miles from the wellhead. "It's going to be with us for a while. I'm worried about some habitats being exposed chronically to low concentrations of toxins. . . . If the water's contaminated, the animals are going to be contaminated."

The truth of the matter is perhaps a compromise between the best case and worst case scenarios offered in the early days of the crisis.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco says the oil is much less visible on the surface and present only in microscopic, dilute droplets further down. She says it's a sign that the gulf ecosystem is resilient and processing the hydrocarbons.

But she warns that "doesn't mean the situation is benign, because it is not.

"There's so much noise out there now saying the gulf is dead or the gulf will come back easily," Lubchenco says. "The truth is in the middle."

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3 Comments

rhonda aucoin
July 29th, 2010 11:10 am
People are starting to ask "where's all the oil" and we're starting to hear reports that the marshes, coastline, and wildlife haven't fared as bad as predicted. There are many explanations for this. If it's true that it isn't going to be as bad as we feared- and believe me, it's bad enough_ all I can say is "Thank you Blessed Mother, our Lady of Prompt Succor."
Jacqui
July 29th, 2010 4:36 pm
The so called experts know nothing of God or His power and cannot even imagine that He could clean up our mess so quickly. Remember that they also said it would be decades before Yellowstone would recover after the wildfires in the mid 80's? It was not even one decade before remarkable recovery was noted with some chagrin by those same experts. They just don't know.
Pam
July 31st, 2010 7:27 am
I would certainly like God to intervene to deliver us from the yet untold consequences of the oil spill--However, bad as the oil spill is, we are experiencing a much greater catastrophe from which we must pray for deliverance: the secularization of our American culture built on our Constitution and Founding Principles. In fact, allegiance to quite a number of false ideologies and tenets is growing all over our country and these are destroying us at a much "deeper" level than the oil spill!

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