by Andrew Travers, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Amid new reports of oil washing up on the shores of Texas and inland in Louisiana’s Lake Ponchartrain from the ongoing 78-day-old BP oil spill, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) head Jane Lubchenco warned of unprecedented and unpredictable damage to the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem on Tuesday.
In an afternoon public interview with NBC newswoman Andrea Mitchell at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Lubchenco said the tar balls and black oil now washing up in all five coastal gulf states may not be the worst of what’s coming out of BP’s broken Deepwater Horizon well.
Lubchenco, a marine ecologist and Denver native picked by President Obama to run NOAA, described the unknowable threat of an invisible oil cloud sitting between 3,300 and 5,600 feet below the Gulf surface, hovering around the still-leaking well.
“What we are seeing from many of our research vessels that are out there is the appearance of a cloud of very fine droplets,” she said.
While the oil on the surface is contaminating beaches and killing marshlands, they can’t say what this underwater layer is doing, because they’ve never seen one before.
“That layer is introducing a lot of carbon into this ecosystem and we don’t know what the fate of that will be,” she explained, describing the cloud as “highly toxic and undoubtedly poisonous.”
“This is really unprecedented … . It is not like a black ooze that’s down there, it’s this cloud of fine mist and its impact is likely to be considerable,” she said.
Lubchenco said that, for now, the gulf current is not going to take oil into the Florida Keys or up the East Coast. But she said the feds are bracing themselves for this year’s hurricane season, which runs through the winter and has the potential to derail cleanup efforts and change the loop current.
“All signs are pointing to an above average hurricane season this year,” she said, noting that the National Hurricane Center has predicted three to seven major hurricanes for the Atlantic Ocean, and potentially the Gulf of Mexico. Last month’s Hurricane Alex, the first June hurricane on record since 1996, was hundreds of miles away from the spill and the federal cleanup effort. Yet, she said, “the waves that were generated by that storm really impaired much of the cleanup operation.”
Lubchenco made her fifth visit to the spill zone last week, along with Vice President Joe Biden. She said she has come to regard it as “a human tragedy and an environmental disaster.” The coastal residents she’s encountered are characterized by what she called “deep anger, deep anxiety, real frustration and genuine concern about the future.”
She championed an American movement toward renewable energy, and off of oil, while warning of the hazards of oil exploration in the Arctic which outweigh the risks in the Gulf of Mexico.
“This event is causing everyone to rethink the drilling practices everyplace,” she said. “The Arctic is particularly vulnerable environmentally. We don’t understand how oil behaves in really cold water. Once it gets under the ice it is next to impossible to recover it. And there are some very vulnerable species and habitats up there. There are many reasons to be concerned.”
Along with the long-term environmental havoc the BP spill will have on the Gulf Coast, Lubchenco said she remains hopeful that it will have a positive long-term legacy. Noting that the spill began days before the 40th annual celebration of Earth Day, she said she hopes 40 years from now the spill will have sparked a new global commitment to keeping oceans healthy.
In the meantime, she said her team is doing its best “bringing science to the table” while advising the U.S. Coast Guard and federal cleanup teams. “It’s been all hands on deck from the outset,” she said.
Of President Obama and the BP team attempting to stop the ongoing leak of 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil per day, she said, “They have been working really, really hard.”
andrew@aspendailynews.com
Special thanks to Richard Charter