Friday, April 20, 2012

Deepwater Horizon Keeps On Killing & Drilling

Two Years Ago - Deepwater Horizon
Great addiction takes extraordinary effort, if the addict hopes to recover the ability to refuse to use the crippling drug.

The oil addiction problem for civilization is a great addiction.

The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, which to this day, two years after the explosion shown in the photograph took place, triggered events that are still killing people, and still killing the environment, with the poisonous drug civilization is greatly addicted to.

Today, I will quote from a blog that links to several sources which lay out an ongoing, terrible, and lasting situation.

A situation destructive to our environment, and destructive to our people all along the gulf:
... there are numerous signs that the worst-case scenario may be playing out:
  • A recent report also notes that there are flesh-eating bacteria in tar balls of BP oil washing up on Gulf beaches
(Washington's Blog). It is an ugly, deadly addiction that requires extraordinary effort to resist, which our government is not taking seriously enough, and an extraordinary addiction that our government is not resisting well at all:
Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years. In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the 8th joint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.
(Independent, 12-13-11, emphasis added). Not only that, now methane has been discovered being released from cracks in the arctic ice:
The researchers found significant amounts of methane being released from the ocean into the atmosphere through cracks in the melting sea ice. They said the quantities could be large enough to affect the global climate. Previous observations have pointed to large methane plumes being released from the seabed in the relatively shallow sea off the northern coast of Siberia but the latest findings were made far away from land in the deep, open ocean where the surface is usually capped by ice.

Eric Kort of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that he and his colleagues were surprised to see methane levels rise so dramatically each time their research aircraft flew over cracks in the sea ice.

"When we flew over completely solid sea ice, we didn't see anything in terms of methane. But when we flew over areas were the sea ice had melted, or where there were cracks in the ice, we saw the methane levels increase," Dr Kort said. "We were surprised to see these enhanced methane levels at these high latitudes. Our observations really point to the ocean surface as the source, which was not what we had expected," he said.

"Other scientists had seen high concentrations of methane in the sea surface but nobody had expected to see it being released into the atmosphere in this way," he added.
(Independent, 4-23-12, emphasis added). Surprises are not very good sometimes, and this is one of those times.

The next post in this series is here.

1 comment:

  1. Antonia Juhasz has good, up-to-date coverage in her book "The Black Tide": Link

    ReplyDelete