http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/hiddenoilplumes.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_196

September 20, 2010

Below the surface, thousands of marine creatures are still in danger from Gulf oil disaster

University of Georgia oceanographer Samantha Joye, like most scientists, always has a plan. Especially when it involves complex, expensive research cruises.

But the Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout, and the enormous environmental destruction it is causing, forced her to change the way she works.

“As an oceanographer, you are trained to make these detailed cruise plans,” notes Joye. “Everything is just so, ‘I’m going to be here on day one and here on day ten’.”

Days after the BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people, Joye got the wheels in motion to submit a proposal for a “Grant for Rapid Response Research” from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Her goal was to investigate underwater oil and gas plumes, and determine how this disaster was impacting deepwater organisms.

Within a week, NSF approved the grant. Joye and her team from the University of Georgia, along with researchers from several other universities, spent May 24 through June 6, 2010 aboard the University of Miami research vessel, Walton Smith, departing from Gulfport, Miss.

“I don’t think I’ve ever flown by the seat of my pants the way we were flying there. But these are dynamic features, changing every single day,” says Joye.
One complication of this trip: the smells of the huge amount of hydrocarbons that started spewing on April 20th. It could sometimes be overpowering.

“It was nauseating,” says Joye. She described the intense smell as something like a cross between diesel fuel, creosote, and gasoline.

“Just wretched, wretched, dense air and it’s hot, it’s humid, and the air is just saturated with these very uncomfortable smells,” she explains.

The scientists and the ship’s crew had to wear respirators and protective suits at times, especially near “ground zero” where the blowout occurred.

Joye is a biogeochemist, who studies the natural seepage of oil and gas from the floor of the Gulf. At the time, the natural seepage rate in the Gulf of Mexico was on the order of 1,000 barrels a day, over the entire Gulf. But in a 20-mile-long, 3-mile-wide oil and gas plume Joye tracked, the amount of oil and gas was off the charts.

“The gas concentrations are outrageously high. We have measured concentrations up to 100,000 times what we typically see in the Gulf of Mexico,” says Joye.

Some deepwater creatures in the Gulf process tiny amounts of oil and gas that occur normally in the water.

“There is a whole slew of organisms that depend on these natural seeps, and in these ecosystems, the one thing that these organisms need that can be taken away by this oil spill is oxygen,” explains Joye. “That’s because they eat oil and gas but the bacteria that sustain them are oxygen-requiring bacteria. So without oxygen, they can’t survive.”

Joye says that methane gas could create more zones of low oxygen in the Gulf, possibly choking off these deep water ecosystems.

To give a human equivalent, Joye says, “It would be like having your Thanksgiving dinner, but suddenly the living room is filled with argon or CO2 instead of oxygen. There’s all this food around you, but you can’t eat it because you are suffocating.”

Joye says this prolonged environmental tragedy has had a profound impact on those who study life in the Gulf.

“I would characterize it as a transformative event because it changed the way I approached what I was doing. It was a disaster response instead of just a research cruise. There was this sense of urgency that I can’t describe in words,” says Joye.

Two of her students also were motivated to work as hard, and for as long as they possibly could, each day on the ship.

Microbiologist Melitza Crespo-Medina is a University of Georgia postdoctoral student.

“We started working at 9 a.m. until 1 or 2 in the morning. It was really intensive,” says Crespo-Medina. “And I really remember this water looked clear, absolutely clear, but I remember the smell of it, I can’t believe this water that looks clear smells so much like gas, like diesel. And that sticks in my mind.”

The research cruise was the first-ever for undergraduate ecology student Chassidy Mann.

“So the experience wasn’t just collecting the data, the experience wasn’t just being amidst other people, it was science exploration, and for me, it was unparalleled to anything I have ever experienced,” says Chassidy.
One night, the rescue of a single, oil-soaked bird had an impact on everyone on the ship.

“He was exhausted. His wings were covered in oil, his eyes, [and] his mouth. It was just gut-wrenching and everyone was in tears, myself included. You see this innocent animal, doing the same thing that it had done for all of its life. And instantly, he is coated in this stuff that weighs down his wings. And there’s just this look of desperation and fear in his eyes,” says Joye. “Animals like that bird, whales, and sea turtles, and fish, and every organism that inhabits the Gulf of Mexico are being exposed to an atrocity.”

What has frustrated Joye and many other scientists since this disaster began is the lack of information about the precise amount of oil and gas that has spewed from the well site.

“It took two months to nail down the magnitude of this spill. I’m still not convinced that it’s an accurate number; 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil per day, that doesn’t even include gas flux. The gas flux is probably another 30 percent on top of that,” she says.

Shortly after she returned from this research cruise, Joye testified before Congress about some of her initial findings, and the very long road ahead for the recovery of the Gulf.

“In my congressional testimony, one of the biggest things I hammered again and again was the need to document the size of this spill,” she says. “You can’t even begin to fathom the environmental implications if you don’t know how much gas and oil have come out of this wellhead.”

Since this NSF cruise, the Deepwater Horizon well has been capped. But Joye wants to make sure the public knows that just because the oil is no longer gushing out, the problems are far from over. She is especially concerned about the dispersants used to break up the oil and gas, to try to keep it from reaching shore.

The dispersant has not been widely tested on marine organisms, according to Joye. And it makes locating plumes of oil and gas much more difficult, even impossible, with satellite imagery.

“The volume, the sheer magnitude of dispersant application is mind-boggling. The fact is that we have no idea what this could do to the system. The dispersant is a complex chemical milieu of who knows what,” explains Joye. “It [the use of dispersants] does one thing really well. It masks the magnitude of the spill, and it potentially does many, many things badly.”

Joye wants a closer look at safety issues in offshore drilling. She also sees this horrible incident as a wakeup call for everyone when it comes to energy use.
“The impact of this is big, and it’s wide, and it’s bad, and it’s ugly. The global appetite for oil and gas is driven by each one of us,” says Joye. “And until each one of us changes our attitude, it’s not going to get any better.”

Miles O’Brien, Science Nation Correspondent
Marsha Walton, Science Nation Producer

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.truth-out.org/university-groups-raises-bp-oil-spill-contaminants-entering-food-supply63367

This kind of information–about our U.S. C.G. being complicit in covering up oil spill problems–makes me angry and disappointed. How does it come to this? Why? DV

Sunday 19 September 2010
by: Chris Rodda, t r u t h o u t | Report

(Photo: Kean University/Be The Change)

Over the Labor Day weekend, the Perdido Bay Mullet Festival in Lillian, Alabama had to do something it’s never had to do before — substitute catfish for mullet. Why? Because, according to event organizer Bill Cornell, the company that supplies the mullet for the annual festival “didn’t feel good about the fish” and “won’t sell them for human consumption.” The seafood supplier, Wallace Seafood, had found unusual white spots on some of the mullet being caught, and won’t sell the fish until testing is completed to see if they’re safe to eat. According to the company’s Brent Wallace, “Mullet feed off the bottom and we don’t know what’s been down there.”

Another fisherman raised the same concern as Wallace Seafood — that mullet are bottom feeders so you don’t know what they’ve been eating — and added that because of their migratory nature, you also don’t know where they’ve been eating. This fisherman, nicknamed “Red,” who talked about the oil not being visible on the surface because the dispersants have made it sink down into the water, explained how mullet eat, sucking just about anything into what he called their “gizzard,” the black spot seen on the fish in the video below.

With the very unsurprising revelation reported by NPR last Monday that the oil from the BP oil spill isn’t gone, but has merely sunk to the sea floor, it’s no big leap to assume that the diet of these bottom-feeding, migratory fish is likely to include just about anything in that “fluffy and porous” layer of oil and “recently dead” things reported by Samantha Joye from the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia. As David Hollander of the University of South Florida is quoted as saying in the same NPR report, “A lot of fish go down to the bottom and eat and then come back up. And if all their food sources are derived from the bottom, then indeed you could have this impact.”

Bottom-feeding fish used as hog feed

Meanwhile, despite these concerns, bottom-feeding fish like mullet are currently being caught and eaten all over the Gulf, with the potential risk not being limited to direct human consumption of the fish, but indirectly by mullet being fed to hogs, as Dr. Norma Bowe of Kean University in New Jersey observed a few weeks ago. Striking up a conversation with some fishermen who were hauling in nets full of mullet from a pier in Long Beach, Mississippi, Dr. Bowe found out that one of the men was also a hog farmer who was catching the mullet to feed to his hogs. The hog farmer, who said he fishes from this pier every day, proudly told Bowe to just ask anybody and they’d tell her that his bacon, pork chops, ham hocks, and ribs are the best around, attributing the high quality of the meat from his hogs to their high protein fish diet. And, according to the fishermen that Bowe spoke to, these fish are also used in a variety of other products for both human and pet consumption — from Omega-3 fish oil supplements to cat food. Part of this conversation was caught on video by one of Bowe’s students.

Photos taken by Bowe and her students while this hog farmer was pulling in his catch show cleanup workers nearby in the background, obviously indicating that there was something very close to this pier in need of cleaning up. And, according to Bowe, the rocks under the pier were visibly coated with oil, which can clearly be seen in additional photos. Yet this pier is open for fishing. Was what Dr. Bowe and her students observed at this pier in Long Beach an isolated incident? Not according to “Red,” who has kept in touch with Bowe since her trip. “Red” reported finding crabs filled with oil just over a week ago at another pier in nearby Gulfport, which is also open for fishing.

Is the use of mullet as livestock feed an unusual practice? Not at all. Besides local hog farmers catching their own mullet to feed their own hogs, fish meal made from this type of fish is a common ingredient in commercially produced feed for both livestock and poultry, as well as feed for farm-raised seafood.

The initial concern of Dr. Bowe, who holds a Ph.D. in Community Health Policy, was the same as most other health professionals — the long term health effects of exposure to the oil and chemicals that people are coming in contact with: “My concern is for the public’s health. We know that short term exposure to the chemicals found in crude oil can cause skin rashes and lesions, headaches, fatigue, dizziness, and upper respiratory issues such as infections. Less is known about long term exposure, however benzene — a chemical contained in crude oil — is considered a carcinogen.” But, after the discovery that these same chemicals may be entering the food supply indirectly through livestock, Bowe added that studies of chemicals entering the food supply are also necessary: “Long term exposure studies are needed, as well as determining the effects if the chemicals reach the food supply.”

Is the FDA doing any special testing of this animal feed in the wake of the oil spill? Apparently not. In fact, Shannon Cameron, an FDA Health Communications Specialist, denied that Gulf fish are even being fed to livestock. In a message left in response to my question about whether or not testing was being done on the fish used in livestock feed, Cameron said, “I was forwarded your inquiry about Gulf fish being fed to livestock. It is not being fed to livestock.”

If Gulf fish are not being used for livestock feed, as Cameron asserts, then why would companies such as Omega Protein Corporation, which describes itself as “the nation’s largest manufacturer of heart-healthy fish oils containing Omega-3 fatty acids for human consumption, as well as specialty fish meals and fish oil used as value-added ingredients in aquaculture, swine and other livestock feeds,” be putting out press releases to its shareholders about the effects of the oil spill on its Gulf fishing operations? A June press release stated that “the Company’s Gulf of Mexico fish catch was 17 percent behind its Gulf of Mexico 2010 fish catch plan,” so the other 83 percent of its planned Gulf catch was obviously being caught.

The fish used by Omega Protein Corporation is menhaden, a forage fish which, like the mullet, has a filtering system. Prior to the BP oil spill, the biggest concern about menhaden was that their numbers were becoming so depleted because of their use in Omega-3 fish oil and livestock feed. In short, menhaden are a natural water filter, with each adult fish capable of filtering several gallons of water per minute, clearing the water of excess algae to allow the sunlight to get to oxygen producing undersea plant life. One can only guess what the menhaden in the Gulf are now filtering out of the water there.

Numerous samples now at Kean University for independent testing

Backing up a bit to explain how Kean University became involved in collecting samples from the Gulf, it all started in July, when Dr. Bowe and a group of students from the university’s Be the Change group took a trip to New Orleans to help an elderly woman whose home had been in need of repairs and painting since Hurricane Katrina. Months earlier, while planning this trip, the oil spill happened, so the students decided that after completing their volunteer project in New Orleans, they would spend a few days in the the area affected by the spill, volunteering to help with the cleanup. By July, however, the Deepwater Horizon Response Unified Command had seized control of volunteer efforts from the organizations that had been recruiting volunteers, so the group’s plan to volunteer through an organization they had contacted back in May was off. Undeterred, the students simply asked around and found the nearest beach where a cleanup effort was underway, still hoping to find a way to help. The beach they ended up on was in Pass Christian, Mississippi.

The disparities between what the group observed on this beach in July and what they were hearing from official sources made Bowe decide that she had to go back to find out what was really going on. So, on August 26, she returned, accompanied by two of the students from the first trip, Kayla Duncan and Nicolette Maggio. This time, Bowe was on a mission to collect samples for testing. And collect samples she did — over sixty of them — evading the obstacles reported by others, such as the confiscation of samples collected on public beaches, run-ins with local law enforcement, and the blocking of access to research sites to prevent non-BP or non-government scientists from doing independent testing.

While some of Bowe’s success in collecting such a large number of samples, many from areas that few have been able to access, can be chalked up to sheer resourcefulness, much more must be attributed to her people skills. By simply spending a little time with local workers and fishermen, and showing them that she was in this for the long haul, Bowe and her students quickly found themselves on a boat with “Red,” being taken to areas where the fishermen — probably the best judges of what doesn’t look right — thought that testing should be done, and what in particular they want to see tested.

The wide variety of samples collected on this trip are now in a lab at Kean, with the testing being performed by a group of scientists made up of Dr. Jeffrey Toney, the university’s Dean of Natural, Applied, and Health Sciences, (who is already covering the effects of the spill at NJ Voices), and other members of the science faculty. While all handling of the samples has been restricted to faculty members, one student, Mario DaCosta, will be permitted to observe and assist. As one of the students on Be The Change’s first Gulf trip in July, DaCosta, a chemistry major, has earned the opportunity to see the project through by being in on the sample testing.
In addition to the scores of water, sand, soil, plant, and biological samples collected by Bowe and her students, the samples now at Kean for testing include a few from other sources. One of these came from a tackle shop owner who, while cleaning up the mess that was washing up behind his shop, was told that he wasn’t allowed to be handling what was behind his shop because he didn’t have the proper training to be handling hazardous materials. The shop owner kept a sample of what he had been cleaning up, holding onto it until he could put it into good hands, and those hands were Dr. Bowe’s.

What’s up with the Coast Guard?

On the first trip in July, the Kean University group was told by an employee from the company doing the cleanup of the Pass Christian beach that he had been alarmed by the hundreds (if not thousands) of dead jellyfish that were covering the beach. The employee had reported his concerns to the Coast Guard, but was told by a Coast Guard scientist that the oily substance being left on the beach by the dead jellyfish was just the natural organic matter left when jellyfish decompose. Not buying this explanation, one of the students, Benito Nieves, snuck a sample of the decomposing jellyfish mess into a water bottle, and, although anyone with a properly functioning nose could tell that the substance in this water bottle was full of oil, the sample was delivered to Dr. Toney.

But this wasn’t the only thing that raised questions about the Coast Guard among the Kean students. On July 31, while the group was on the Pass Christian beach, a Coast Guard photographer arrived to shoot photos of the workers. The students took numerous photos of this Coast Guard photographer during the ten minutes that he was posing and shooting his photos of two workers. The students photos, a few of which are below, show exactly where the Coast Guard photographer and workers were positioned throughout the photo shoot.

But, in the final photo posted on the Coast Guard website, the workers, one of whom appears to be hard at work stirring the crystal clear water with his shovel, are not standing where the students’ photos show them being posed and photographed. According to the date and time listed on the Coast Guard website for this photo, there is no question that this was the photo that the students witnessed and photographed the Coast Guard photographer taking. (The second student photo above shows where the photographer and workers were positioned at 1:04 p.m. The time on this Coast Guard photo is 1:05 p.m.)

According to Bowe and her students, who had walked this entire stretch of beach, there was no place on this beach that looked anything like what appears in the Coast Guard photo. Here are some of the photos taken by the students, who, in addition to those already mentioned in this article, included Elissa Hyer, Alexandra Bastos, and Rebecca Bowe. This is what was on the beach right where the Coast Guard photographer was shooting his photo of the workers. (The video clip at the end pans around to show where the students took these photos in relation to the yellow boom where the Coast Guard photographer was positioned.)

Here’s another photo taken by the same Coast Guard photographer, on the same beach in Pass Christian a little earlier that same day, again showing crystal clear water and not a tar ball in sight.

But look at this video, released by the Coast Guard itself. The video, of the same two workers, in the same spot, shot by the same photographer, on the same day, shows water and sand not nearly as clean as in the photo, with the workers finding numerous tar balls. As they say on Sesame Street, “One of these things is not like the other.”

That many Mississippians can’t be wrong

The towns mentioned in this article — Pass Christian, Long Beach, and Gulfport — are three towns right in a row within a few miles of each other. This is the same stretch of Mississippi’s coast reported on by Truthout in Monday 13 September 2010’s article “Evidence Mounts of BP Spraying Toxic Dispersants.” It would be almost redundant to report any more of what the fishermen who talked to the Kean University group said they’ve seen, because it would essentially just confirm much of what Truthout’s Dahr Jamail was told by Pass Christian residents Shirley and Don Tillman, and what many other Mississipians have been saying. Unless one of the effects of the oil spill has been collective hallucinations, what these people are reporting is what’s really happening.

One thing should be added, however, about those suspicious out of state boats in BP’s Vessels Of Opportunity (VOO) program, described by the Tillman’s, which seem to be a subject of particular opprobrium to the local residents. These boats might not just have been brought in from other states, but from another country. Photos taken by the Kean students of one of these boats, on which little care was taken to completely cover up the boat’s prior information, show that this boat’s name was changed from the “Aarluk” to the “Sea Launch,” and “Biloxi” was slapped over “Upernavik.” Where is Upernavik? Well, that’s in Greenland.

Editor’s note: Rodda works for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, whose president and founder, Mikey Weinstein, is a member of Truthout’s Board of Advisers.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hPnREe-2-wsDF7Unlu7HJZNLEOZQD9IB4ACG0

Now that the well is capped, hopefully attention will turn to the viability and health of the Gulf which is now at risk. The months to come will challenge us all as no easy solutions are at hand to deal with the monumental volumes of oil still left behind. DV

By ALLEN G. BREED (AP) – 3 hours ago

The “nightmare well” is dead. But the Gulf coast’s bad dream is far from over.
Federal officials declared Sunday that the well where the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded had finally been killed. Workers drilled a relief well into the damaged one and drove a cement stake deep into its oily, black heart.

Its official end came 11 years after Texaco first sank an exploratory well near that same spot 50 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico, then moved on after finding it unprofitable. When BP PLC purchased the rights to explore for oil there in 2008, it held an in-house well-naming contest. The winning team chose the name Macondo, after the mythical town from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Carved out of a “paradise of dampness and silence,” the Macondo of the story is a cursed place, a metaphor for the fate awaiting those too arrogant to heed warning signs.
BP’s name choice came to seem prescient last April 20.

That day, an explosion on the rig – which had drilled the well and was in the process of capping it – killed 11 men instantly and started a slow-motion disaster that has jeopardized the livelihoods of legions of fishermen, hotel and restaurant workers, drilling employees and others.

In the three months before a temporary cap stemmed the flow from the blown-out well, as much as 172 million gallons of oil and millions of cubic feet of natural gas spewed into Gulf waters.

For those most directly affected by the spill – the ones who still await BP checks for lost wages and revenues, who live on beaches where oil mats are just now coming ashore – the feeling of helplessness remains raw, like a freshly stitched wound.

“If you had to live with all the uncertainty, for all those months,” says Mike Helmer, a fishing guide out of Lafitte, La. “I can promise you it’s not easy. And it’s not over.”

At the well’s death, Associated Press reporters who covered the disaster checked in with scientists awaiting test results, with business and legal analysts seeking answers and resolutions, and with Gulf residents looking to an uncertain future and struggling against the “quicksand of forgetfulness” that consumed the fictional Macondo. Here are their reports.
___

DRILLING FOR ANSWERS

Before the smoke even cleared, fingers of blame were pointing in many directions.
BP’s internal investigation, released earlier this month, accused subcontractor Halliburton of improperly cementing the well. It blamed rig owner Transocean Ltd. for problems with the blowout preventer on the seafloor a mile down. It even pointed at itself, acknowledging that if the results of a critical pressure test had been correctly interpreted, workers would have known something was horribly wrong in time to do something about it. (It was a BP engineer who once described Macondo as a “nightmare well.”)

While the company’s report went a long way toward previewing its legal strategy and explaining how a bubble of explosive gas made a 3-mile-plus journey from the bottom of the well to the drilling rig, it left many questions unanswered.

Those questions will be addressed by government investigators, other companies’ investigations, congressional committees and by examinations of key pieces of evidence plucked from the seafloor.

Some of those probes are looking specifically at factors BP downplayed – including the company’s well design.

The conclusions will help determine who is liable for the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, and what share of the blame – and of the bill – the various companies with ties to the rig and its equipment will be responsible for. Based on an upper estimate of the oil spilled, BP and others could be fined up to $5.4 billion for violating water pollution laws, or up to $21 billion if gross negligence is found.

The blowout preventer, perhaps the most critical piece of evidence, now sits under guard at a NASA facility in New Orleans, awaiting forensic analysis.

“The whole matter of the BOP, whether it worked or didn’t work … could change the whole outcome of the whole investigation,” says Daniel Becnel, an attorney representing a host of plaintiffs in the consolidated federal court case.

The examination, however, is not set to begin until at least Oct. 1, according to internal e-mails and court documents obtained by AP. Meanwhile, scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey are analyzing pieces of debris that rained down on an adjacent cargo ship, the Damon Bankston, during the blast.

This rocklike debris, which could be cement or chunks from the sea floor, will also help piece together what went wrong inside the well.

_ By DINA CAPPIELLO, Washington, D.C.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/09/gulf-oil-spill-bacteria-mainly-ate-the-gas-not-the-oil.html

Greenspace
ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS FROM CALIFORNIA AND BEYOND

September 16, 2010 | 9:33 pm
Bacteria that attacked the plumes of oil and gas from the Deepwater Horizon gusher in the Gulf of Mexico mainly digested natural gas spewing from the wellhead – propane, ethane and butane – rather than oil, according to a study published in the journal Science.

The paper doesn’t rule out the possibility that bacteria also are consuming oil from the spill, the authors said. Instead, it suggests that natural gas primed the growth of bacteria that may have gone on to digest “more complex hydrocarbons” – oil – as the spill aged and propane and ethane were depleted.

Still, lead author David L. Valentine, a professor of microbial geochemistry at UC Santa Barbara, said the findings temper hopes that microorganisms detected by scientists in the gulf have eaten up most of the oil there, as other scientists had recently suggested. “It’s hard to imagine these bacteria are capable of taking down all components of oil,” he said. “These stories about superbugs taking down all the oil – it’s more complex than that.”

Valentine and his team conducted their research in the gulf during 10 days in June. Lowering an array of sensors over the side of their ship, they analyzed ocean water to determine the presence of oil, then collected water samples at 31 locations 0.6 to 7.7 miles from what was then the active spill site.

Comparing samples collected close to the leak’s origin with older samples collected farther away, the researchers detected declining proportions of propane and ethane the older the sample. As levels of propane and ethane declined, the number of bacteria believed to be capable of digesting those chemicals – Cycloclasticus, Colwellia and Oceanospirillaceae – grew.

The team observed other chemical changes that suggested the bacteria were at work digesting gas. They saw that types of propane and ethane that bacteria prefer to digest – ones containing carbon-12, a lighter isotope of carbon – were depleted in samples.

And they found that the levels of oxygen (which bacterial populations consume as they grow) in the water fell in step with the falling levels of propane and ethane. They concluded that 70% of oxygen depletion was the result of microbial digestion of these natural gas chemicals, suggesting that most of the bacterial action was against gas, not oil.

Richard Camilli, an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said that these findings are the first to establish that the observed biodegradation in the deep plumes was limited mostly to natural gas.

“This paper is opening the door to other questions,” said Camilli, who was not involved with this research but published a paper in an August edition of Science on the size of the gulf spill’s oil plume. “If it’s disproportionately natural gas that’s being degraded, what’s going on with the crude oil components?”

But Terry Hazen, head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s ecology department and lead author of another August paper in Science that documented growth of hydrocarbon-eating bacteria in the deep-sea plume and suggested microbes could consume much of the oil, said that “the three papers are complementary. All show different pieces of the puzzle.”

Valentine said he will now investigate whether the bacteria began eating the spilled oil, or some component of it, as time passed. “We know there’s gas consumption; we know these organisms are here. How did that transition over time?” he said. “Did they move to oil over time, or did they bias which components of the oil [were consumed] next? We don’t know yet.”
He noted that many organisms that consume propane and butane can also consume other components of oil. But, he said, these longer, more complex hydrocarbons can be harder to digest.

— Eryn Brown

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.theind.com/news/6946-scientists-allege-oil-commission-trying-to-stifle-research

This is really troubling, together with the older info that Obama and the Defense Dept are secretly still spraying coastal areas with dispersant under cover of darkness. This is not the transparency we expected of our president and his oil commission. DV

The Independent, Written by Nathan Stubbs
Friday, 17 September 2010

Two scientists, hired by a New Orleans law firm to conduct independent research in the Gulf, say they recently received some intimidating phone calls from attorneys representing the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. WWL-TV in New Orleans reports that Dr. William Sawyer, a Florida-based toxicologist, and Marco Kaltofen, a scientist and head of Boston Chemical Data in Massachusetts, began receiving calls from the commission after posting data online that showed alarming levels of toxic hydrocarbons in water column. The researchers were both hired to conduct their studies by the New Orleans-based Smith Stag law firm, which specializes in environmental and personal injury law and has been assisting landowners and commercial fishermen in filing claims against BP. Sawyer and Kaltofen claim the commission attorneys asked if there research was meant to disprove findings by the federal government or impugn the commission and then began questioning whether the scientists had all the necessary permits to continue their work.

The oil spill commission was established by President Obama in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy to study the cause and impact of the spill, and make policy recommendations based on their findings. In response to the accusations, Commission Press Secretary Dave Cohen released a statement to WWL noting that Sawyer was “…One of many experts with whom we were having discussions to gain insights and possibly serve as expert panelists before the commission…. We deeply regret if any question we may have asked created a misunderstanding.”

The incident has already prompted Congressman Joseph Cao of New Orleans to call for a Congressional investigation into the matter. Cao released the following statement in a press release last night:
Today, I was informed that attorneys from the President’s oil spill commission were contacting independent researchers who are studying the Gulf’s toxicity and possibly attempting to suppress their findings by questioning the researchers’ permit status. I also found out WWL-TV has uncovered information which appears to contradict statements made just yesterday by federal representatives that there is no contamination in Gulf seafood. The public has a right to know whether or not the water and our seafood are safe based on the best data available. I’m concerned the Administration is not taking this issue as seriously as it should be. So I have decided to call for an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, on which I sit.

_____________________

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/09/gulf-oil-spill-bacteria-mainly-ate-the-gas-not-the-oil.html

Special thanks to Richard Charter