http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/03/31/scientists-find-2000-year-old-coral-near-gulf-spill-site/

Yeah, and how many corals have been buried by the oil????? DV

Posted on March 31, 2011 at 10:45 am by Associated Press in Gulf Oil Disaster, Social

CAIN BURDEAU
Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS – Federal scientists say they have dated coral living near the site of the busted BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico at 2,000 years old.

The U.S. Geological Survey said Wednesday it had determined the age of the black coral in the Gulf for the first time. Scientists had been studying the ancient slow-growing corals before BP’s well blew out on April 20, 2010. The corals were found about 21 miles northeast of the BP well living 1,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf.

“They’re extremely old and extremely slow-growing,” said Nancy Prouty, a USGS scientist. “And there are big questions about their vulnerability and their ability for recovery.”

Black corals feed on organic matter sinking to the sea floor and it could take decades, or even centuries, to recover from “a disturbance to these ecosystems,” Prouty said.

She said scientists were looking at whether the ancient coral had been damaged by the BP oil spill, but the damage assessment had not been completed.

The location of the black coral is important because computer models and research cruises have mapped much of the deepwater oil moving to the southwest of the BP well, away from the black coral colony. Scientists have found dead coral southwest of the well.
However, Prouty said the surface oil slick was over the black coral colony during the spill.
BP’s well leaked more than 200 million gallons of oil after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers.

Black corals, which resemble deep-sea bushes or trees, are found throughout the world and are an important marine habitat for fish and other forms of marine life. They grow very slowly – a human fingernail grows 200 times faster than black coral, USGS said.

Most of the Gulf’s bottom is muddy and the coral colonies that pop up every once in a while are vital oases for marine life in the chilly ocean depths.

The USGS study was part of a larger federal survey of fragile reef ecosystems.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/42322119/ns/us_news-environment/

Confidential data due to BP inquiry frustrates some researchers seeking answers

–
Federal scientists trying to figure out why dolphin deaths along the Gulf of Mexico are up this year now have a second challenge: a sharp jump in sea turtle deaths in some Gulf areas.

“In the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen an increase” in turtle deaths in the northern Gulf, Connie Barclay, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told msnbc.com.

Since March 15, she noted, 39 deaths were confirmed in Mississippi, 4 in Alabama and 3 in Louisiana.

“The spring time is the typical time when turtle strandings in this region begin to increase,” Barclay added, “but the sharp increases in recent days are of concern.”
“Tests will be done for biotoxins, such as those from harmful algae blooms, which are common in the Gulf,” she said, and NOAA is contacting states to see if fishermen are accidentally hooking sea turtles.

“All causes of death, including petroleum, will be investigated when possible, based on decomposition,” she added, and “all turtles are being carefully examined for signs of external oiling.”

Some 400 sea turtle deaths were reported in the five months after the BP oil spill last April, but the number dropped off sharply starting in October. All seven species of sea turtles are listed under the Endangered Species Act.

The news comes as the mystery behind the dolphin deaths grew to include a sense of intrigue: NOAA is keeping a tight lid on its ongoing probe into the deaths, which are possibly connected to the BP spill, causing tension with some independent scientists.
In the case of dolphins, biologists hired by the National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of NOAA, to collect specimens and tissue samples were quietly told late last month to keep their findings confidential.

The order was in a Fisheries Service letter informing outside scientists that its review of the dolphin die-off, classified as an “unusual mortality event (UME),” had been folded into a federal criminal investigation of the oil spill.

“Because of the seriousness of the legal case, no data or findings may be released, presented or discussed outside the UME investigative team without prior approval,” said the letter, obtained by Reuters.

The Fisheries Service “did not issue a gag order,” Blair Mase, the agency’s stranding coordinator for the Southeast, told msnbc.com in response to the disclosure. “We did ask partners” to refrain from releasing data so as “to ensure confidentiality.”

Still, a number of partner scientists said they have been personally rebuked by federal officials for “speaking out of turn” to the media about efforts to determine the cause of some 136 dolphin deaths this year in the Gulf, and 115 others last year after the April spill.

Moreover, they said collected samples and specimens are being turned over to the government for analysis under a protocol that will leave independent scientists in the dark about the efficacy and outcome of any lab tests.

Some partner researchers in the agency’s Marine Mammal Stranding Network complained such constraints undermine the transparency of a process normally open to review by the scientific community.

“It throws accountability right out the window,” one biologist involved in tracking dolphin deaths for more than 20 years told Reuters on condition of anonymity. “We are confused and … we are angry because they claim they want teamwork, but at the same time they are leaving the marine experts out of the loop completely.”

Some question why the Fisheries Service has taken so long to get samples into laboratories.

“It is surprising that it has been almost a full year since the spill, and they still haven’t selected labs for this kind of work,” said Ruth Carmichael, who studies marine mammals at the independent Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama.

“I can only hope that this process is a good thing. I just don’t know. This is an unfortunate situation.”

Mase, a marine mammal scientist, said lab results would go directly back to the Fisheries Service, and hopefully in about two to three months.

“We have to be very methodical,” Mase said. “The criminal investigation does play a role in the delay of findings, but it has to be done this way.”

For Mase and others, this is the first time their work on marine mammals has become part of a potential crime scene.

“This is all new to pretty much all of us,” she said, adding that “we’re not sure how that’s going to work” when asked if the results would be released to the public before any criminal action.

As of Monday night, scientists counted 136 bottlenose dolphin carcasses found since mid-January along the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, almost half of them newly born or stillborn infants.

And Mase noted that “we’re still in the response phase” since carcasses are washing up daily, including at least two on Tuesday in Louisiana.

The tally so far this year, which compares to 31 deaths on average during the same time of year between 2002 and 2009, coincides with the first dolphin calving season in the northern Gulf since BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded last April.

The blast killed 11 workers and ruptured a wellhead on the sea floor, dumping an estimated 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf over more than three months.

Last year, 115 dead dolphins, most of them adults, washed up along the Gulf Coast in the weeks and months following the blowout.

But Mase pointed out that even before the spill started in late April, a jump in dolphin deaths was seen in February and March of 2010.

The latest spike in deaths, and high concentration of premature infants among them, has led some experts to speculate that oil ingested or inhaled by dolphins during the spill has taken a belated toll on the animals, possibly leading to a wave of dolphin miscarriages.

But most of the specimens collected bear no obvious signs of oil contamination, making lab analysis crucial to understanding what caused the deaths.

Mase said the carcasses also are considered potential evidence in the natural resources damage assessment being conducted in conjunction with civil litigation pursued against BP by the government simultaneously with the criminal probe.

“It is frustrating at times,” she said of the slow process, “but you have to understand the big picture. If there is a responsible party we want to make them responsible.”

Msnbc.com’s Miguel Llanos and Reuters contributed to this report.
Special thanks to Richard Charter

Seriously, can we trust this company with the Arctic Ocean?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/30/bp-missing-laptop-gulf-oil-spill-compensation-claims

BP sends letters to 13,000 Louisiana residents whose data was stored on computer, notifying them of potential security breach

Associated Press
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 30 March 2011 03.36 BST

Workers clean up the oil washed ashore in Alabama from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features

A BP employee has lost a laptop containing personal data belonging to thousands of Louisiana residents who filed claims for compensation after the Gulf oil spill.

The firm said it had sent letters to roughly 13,000 people whose data was stored on the computer, notifying them about the potential security breach and offering to pay for their credit to be monitored.

The laptop was password-protected, but the information was not encrypted.

The data included a spreadsheet of claimants’ names, social security numbers, phone numbers and addresses. Curtis Thomas, a BP spokesman, said the company did not have any evidence that claimants’ personal information had been misused.

“We’re committed to the people of the Gulf coast states affected by the Deepwater Horizon accident and spill, and we deeply regret that this occurred,” he said.

The data belonged to individuals who filed claims with BP before the Gulf Coast Claims Facility took over the processing of claims in August. BP paid roughly $400m (£250m) in claims before the switch. As of Tuesday, the GCCF had paid roughly $3.6bn to 172,539 claimants.

BP said no one would have to resubmit a claim because of the lost data.
The employee lost the laptop on 1 March during “routine business travel”. “If it was stolen, we think it was a crime of opportunity, but it was initially lost,” Thomas said.

BP is offering to pay for claimants to have their credit monitored by Equifax, an Atlanta-based credit bureau. Asked why nearly a month elapsed before BP notified residents about the missing laptop, Thomas said: “We were doing our due diligence and investigating.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.coutrhousenews.com/2011/03/30/35363.htm

By SABRINA CANFIELD

GRAND ISLE, La. (CN) – A billboard on Highway 1 says: Devastating Spill, Devastating Feelings. Inside the Gulf Coast Claims Facility building on the far end of Grand Isle, about 60 people have turned out for a National Resource Damage Assessment public scoping meeting. “You talk about 18 months or so before we get started,” a resident tell trustees. “That’s a long time for us who live here, while our environment and animals are dying.”

“We have a huge problem,” Beverly Armand, continues. “We have to stop denying it. We can’t fix the problem if we deny it is there.”

The National Resource Damage Assessment, or NRDA, is being conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the Department of the Interior, and the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Because of the magnitude of the oil spill and its effects, the earliest that the NRDA plans to have a restoration plan in place is 18 months from now.

The NRDA has held public scoping meetings along the Gulf Coast all month, to find out what concerns residents have and to hear ideas for restoration.

“Medical issues,” Armand says, “many residents have medical issues. BP is not cleaning the beaches. They are burying the problem. We will have children on these beaches. First thing they do will be to dig in the sand, and they will come up with oil.
“The air quality – I don’t even believe anyone is even testing the air anymore.”

“People are suffering,” Armand says. “And please be honest about the continued use of Corexit. They’re continuing to use it. It’s washing up on our beaches all the time.”

Corexit is the brand name for the dispersant BP used to break up the oil that spewed from a broken wellhead for 10 weeks after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon.

Cheryl Brodnax, habitat restoration specialist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the impacts of the oil spill “have been so vast” that creative ideas are a necessity.

“These types of conversations are important,” Brodnax said toward the meeting’s end. “Even if they feel frustrating, they are important.”

The broken wellhead under the Deepwater Horizon, before the drilling rig exploded, is 50 miles offshore from Grand Isle.

Eight miles long and a mile wide, Grand Isle has almost 10 miles of white sand beaches. It once was home to 1,100 residents. With salt water on one side and fresh water on the other, it was a nature lover’s paradise and a fisherman’s dream, with 46 species of game fish.

During his public comment, Wayne Keller from the Grand Isle Port Commission referred to a NOAA check sheet listing resources that may have been affected by the oil spill.

“Probably 99.9 percent of everything you could check off has been impacted,” Keller said. “This is Ground Zero.”

Concerns raised at scoping meetings have varied by location.

At a scoping meeting last week in Biloxi, Miss., Vietnamese shrimpers said they have pulled up nets full of oil from the seafloor and have had to decide whether to report the oil to the Coast Guard, which would mean dumping their day’s catch, or pretend they don’t see the oil.
John Lliff, a supervisor with NOAA’s Damage Assessment Remediation and Restoration Program, said no one knows how much of the seafloor is covered in oil.
Simply lowering a camera to the Gulf floor can take as long as 4 hours. The oil may have sunk in part because of dispersants. Other factors such as sediment might also have caused it to sink, Lliff said.

Shrimpers in Biloxi also said that in places where shrimp have been plentiful, there are no shrimp now.

Fishermen in Pensacola and Panama City, Fla. brought a day’s catch to a scoping meeting to show that several fish had lesions. The fishermen were concerned the lesions were a result of the oil spill.

“Lesions do occur in fish,” Lliff said. “Typically, they are a low occurrence, but fishermen there are saying they are coming up every catch.”

Dr. Susan Shaw, an independent marine toxicologist and director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute in Blue Hill, Maine, said Tuesday in a telephone interview that from a toxicology standpoint, dispersed oil is more toxic than oil by itself.
Shaw said what was supposed to happen with Corexit didn’t happen.

BP has acknowledged that it sprayed and injected at least 1.8 million gallons of the toxic dispersant on the oil, expecting to disperse it into the water rather than float on the Gulf’s surface. But rather than simply disperse the oil, the Corexit caused the oil to change into massive subsea plumes.

Animals, including dolphins, swam through the several-mile-wide plumes.
“We were very concerned last fall about the dolphins,” Shaw said.

She said fishermen have reported that dolphins are coming up to their vessels, looking sick, and sometimes swimming in circles.

NOAA records indicate that since February 2010, 2 months before the disastrous oil spill, dolphins have been dying at unusually high rates. Over the past year there have been three spikes in dolphin deaths. This year alone 136 dolphins have been found dead along a portion of coast off Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Shaw said that dispersants work by breaking the outer membrane of cells: organs and oil alike. The effect on marine life is that the oil can enter the body more readily. Shaw said there is no hard data about the dolphin deaths.

“I don’t feel convinced there is enough testing going on,” she said, adding that it only takes a few hours for decomposition to set in, making it difficult to get good samples.
Scientists conducting the dolphin autopsies are considering all options, NOAA said.

Shaw said she hasn’t seen an autopsy program that includes a test for contaminants, such as dispersants.

Many have attributed the recent spike in dolphin deaths to the oil spill. But assumptions about the oil spill are tricky. To link dolphin deaths to the spill, there must be evidence of death caused by oil and hydrocarbons. Results of such studies could take months, if not years, according to NOAA documents.

Now the dolphin death investigation has been closed by the federal government because its results have to be kept for litigation purposes.

“Now we’re going to know less about it,” Shaw said. “At this point, there are more questions than answers.”

In January, Louisiana Senator A.G. Crowe sent a letter to President Obama, expressing concern that dispersants are still being used in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Mr. President, my concern is that this toxic and damaging chemical is still being used and it will compound the long-term damage to our state, our citizens, our eco-system, our economy, our seafood industry, our wildlife and our culture,” Senator Crowe wrote.

“Many are concerned that the oil laced with this toxic dispersant is still in the Gulf being moved constantly by currents throughout the ecosystem spreading contamination.”

Shaw was on Grand Isle March 12 and 13, collecting samples for research.

“You can see black oil in the soil,” Shaw said. “There is a noticeable absence of marine life and animals. If you dig down 6 inches, oil is coming up – not tar balls, oil.

“There were dolphins in shallow water, swimming.”

Shaw said Grand Isle residents who have had their blood tested for chemicals are finding they have high concentrations of solvents – the chemicals found in dispersants.

Shaw said it is easy to find people who are sick from solvent contamination on Grand Isle.
Libby Comeaux, a Louisiana native, likened the Gulf of Mexico to mother’s milk.

“It’s what we carry with us,” she told the group Monday. “If we slow down, get more information, and make sure we don’t do anymore harm to it. If we can just stop hurting the Gulf …”

Scoping will last until May 18. Public comments are posted on NOAA’s website.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Williams.etal.2011.Underestimating.cetacean.mortality_DeepwaterHorizon.BP.incident.Conservation.Letters

Animal Carcasses Recovered Represent a Small Fraction of Fatalities

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 devastated the Gulf of Mexico ecologically and economically. However, a new study published in Conservation Letters reveals that the true impact of the disaster on wildlife may be gravely underestimated. The study argues that fatality figures based on the number of recovered animal carcasses will not give a true death toll, which may be 50 times higher than believed.

“The Deepwater oil spill was the largest in US history, however, the recorded impact on wildlife was relatively low, leading to suggestions that the environmental damage of the disaster was actually modest,” said lead author Dr Rob Williams from the University of British Columbia.”This is because reports have implied that the number of carcasses recovered, 101, equals the number of animals killed by the spill.”

The team focused their research on 14 species of cetacean, an order of mammals including whales and dolphins. While the number of recovered carcasses has been assumed to equal the number of deaths, the team argues that marine conditions and the fact that many deaths will have occurred far from shore mean recovered carcasses will only account for a small proportion of deaths.

To illustrate their point, the team multiplied recent species abundance estimates by the species mortality rate. An annual carcass recovery rate was then estimated by dividing the mean number of observed strandings each year by the estimate of annual mortality.
The team’s analysis suggests that only 2% of cetacean carcasses were ever historically recovered after their deaths in this region, meaning that the true death toll from the Deepwater Horizon disaster could be 50 times higher than the number of deaths currently estimated.

“This figure illustrates that carcass counts are hugely misleading, if used to measure the disaster’s death toll,” said co-author Scott Kraus of the New England Aquarium “No study on carcass recovery from strandings has ever recovered anything close to 100% of the deaths occurring in any cetacean population. The highest rate we found was only 6.2%, which implied 16 deaths for every carcass recovered.”

The reason for the gulf between the estimates may simply be due to the challenges of working in the marine environment. The Deepwater disaster took place 40 miles offshore, in 1500m of water, which is partly why estimates of oil flow rates during the spill were so difficult to make.

“The same factors that made it difficult to work on the spill also confound attempts to evaluate environmental damages caused by the spill,” said Williams. “Consequently, we need to embrace a similar level of humility when quantifying the death tolls.”

If the approach outlined by this study were to be adopted the team believe this may present an opportunity to use the disaster to develop new conservation tools that can be applied more broadly, revealing the environmental impacts of other human activities in the marine environment.

“The finding that strandings represent a very low proportion of the true deaths is also critical in considering the magnitude of other human causes of mortality like ship strikes, where the real impacts may similarly be dramatically underestimated by the numbers observed” said John Calambokidis, a Researcher with Cascadia Research and a co-author on the publication.

“Our concern also applies to certain interactions with fishing gear, because there are not always systematic data with which to accurately estimate by-catch, especially for large whales”, noted Jooke Robbins, a co-author from the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies. “When only opportunistic observations are available, these likely reflect a fraction of the problem.”

“While we did not conduct a study to estimate the actual number of deaths from the oil spill, our research reveals that the accepted figures are a grave underestimation,” concluded Dr. Williams. “We now urge methodological development to develop appropriate multipliers so that we discover the true cost of this tragedy.”

This study is published in Conservation Letters. Media wishing to receive a PDF of this article may contact Lifesciencenews@wiley.com

Full citation: Williams. R, Gero. S, Bejder. L., Calambokidis. J, Kraus. S, Lusseau. D, Read. A, Robbins. J., “Underestimating the Damage: Interpreting Cetacean Carcass Recoveries in the Context of the Deepwater Horizon/BP Incident”, Conservation Letters, Wiley-Blackwell, March 2011, DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2011.00168.x

Special thanks to Richard Charter