http://www.keysnet.com/2010/08/04/244520/resource-managers-give-oil-spill.html

By KEVIN WADLOW
kwadlow@keynoter.com
Posted – Wednesday, August 04, 2010 11:00 AM EDT

Surface oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster may never reach the Florida Keys, but effects of the estimated remaining 172 million gallons of crude oil that flowed into the northern Gulf of Mexico remain unknown.

“No one knows with any level of confidence what’s going to happen in the Gulf,” said Paul Johnson, a former Reef Relief president now working as a marine consultant to the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Just because [BP] has capped the leak does not necessarily make all that oil go away.”

At 6 p.m. Aug, 4 in Key West, several marine experts will talk about possible ramifications to the Keys from the spill, apparently the largest in U.S. history.

“The Gulf Disaster and the Florida Keys: What Are the Environmental Impacts and How to Help” is the topic of the open seminar at the Florida Keys Eco-Discovery Center, at the Truman Waterfront at the end of Southard Street in Key West.

Conservation groups Oceana and the Natural Resources Defense Council host the event, intended to discuss “potential impacts on Keys habitats and wildlife.” Billy Causey, southeast regional director of the National Marine Sanctuaries Program, will make opening remarks.

Other experts scheduled to speak include David Vaughan, director of the Mote Center for Tropical Coral Reef Research; Jim Fourqurean, a marine biologist at Florida International University; and marine scientist Patrick Rice of Florida Keys Community College.

On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the latest analysis of the spill extent indicates “Southern Florida, the Florida Keys and the East Coast are unlikely to experience any effects from the remaining oil on the surface of the Gulf as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.”

A current eddy in the Gulf of Mexico appears to have contained most of the oil and kept it from reaching the Loop Current that many experts feared would bring the oil to the Florida Straits and the Keys.

For the foreseeable future, NOAA said, “There is no clear way for oil to be transported to southern Florida or beyond. At that point, it is expected that the majority of remaining surface oil will have dissipated.”

The nearest point of the visible oil spill remains an estimated 425 miles from the Keys. However, the biological effects of dissipated oil in the water column, along with chemical dispersants, remain unclear.

“All we can do is continue to monitor it, look at what kinds of impacts we might expect, and what we can do about it,” Johnson said.

Lessons from the Deepwater Horizon disaster may prove useful if Cuba expands oil exploration and drilling in its territorial waters, he said.

“It’s an example for our community on how vulnerable we are to drilling off our shores,” Johnson said. A federal panel reported Monday that the Deepwater Horizon spill off Louisiana may have dumped more than 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. BP managed to recover an estimated 33 million gallons, but the balance remains in gulf waters.

In other recent oil-spill developments:

•Monroe County businesses may be eligible for emergency loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration, under a July 24 declaration. Proof of economic loss will be required. Loan applications can be downloaded from www.sba.gov/services/disasterassistance.

•Singer Jimmy Buffett, a former Key West resident, in July donated a specially designed boat to the Friends of the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge, in Alabama. The shallow-draft boat allows rescuers to reach marshy areas affected by the spill to perform bird and wildlife rescues.

http://www.workingwaterfront.com/articles/Fathoming-Oil-in-the-Gulf-of-Mexico-Not-as-far-away-as-you-think/13980/

The final line in this report is the bomb. DV

by Dr. Heather Deese and Catherine Schmitt

Filaments of warm Gulf Stream water are visible approaching the continental shelf south of Georges Bank and Cape Cod. Source: Dr. Andy Thomas, Satellite Oceanography Data Laboratory, University of Maine. http://wavy.umeoce.maine.edu/

Hundreds of sea turtles, more than sixty porpoises and a sperm whale have been found dead in the Gulf of Mexico region since the BP oil disaster began. As of mid-July, an area of almost 84,000 square miles, over one-third of the Gulf of Mexico, was closed to fishing.

While the impacts of the spill are most visible and devastating in the immediate area, the highly fluid nature of the ocean environment and highly migratory nature of some birds and marine species could transport effects of the oil over large distances.

Oil affects animals in several ways. The most obvious are the immediate, direct physical smothering and coating that impedes movement, vision and temperature control, and poisoning from ingestion of oil. Slower, less obvious. but no less harmful effects result from contamination of the environment, otherwise known as food and habitat. Less food is available as smaller prey organisms die, or else food is polluted. Oil on beaches, marshes, and flats poses a threat to eggs and juveniles. As eggs are contaminated, breeding success rates-which for protected species have been the subject of decades of time, money, and effort-decline.

Will oil from the Gulf of Mexico travel to the Gulf of Maine?

Susan Lozier, an oceanographer at Duke University and an expert on circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, said it is not likely that substantial amounts of oil will reach Cape Cod, Georges Bank or the Gulf of Maine. She noted that initial reports that highlighted the potential for oil to move through the Florida Straits, along the Atlantic seaboard and across the North Atlantic in the Gulf Stream were based on the physics of how ocean currents would carry something that didn’t move or change over time.

Once the effects of oil evaporation, stirring, mixing and degradation are included, the projected concentrations of oil at significant distances from the source drop dramatically. Lozier predicts “oil will likely be seen only in trace quantities in the area north of Cape Hatteras, with a highly patchy distribution.”

Aside from breakdown of the oil en route, the Gulf Stream itself poses a major barrier to northward transport. Amy Bower, a physical oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution emphasized that surface water in the Gulf Stream moves northeastward and eastward so rapidly that cross-stream movement is difficult. According to Bower, “long, thin filaments of water can be pinched off from Gulf Stream meanders or rings”, which do deliver warm, southern water onto the New England shelf. However, Bower echoed Lozier’s assessment that any oil in Gulf Stream filaments is likely to be highly diluted.

What will be the impacts on animals that move between the two Gulfs?

The most prominent animal that spends time in both the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of Maine is the bluefin tuna. This species, which fuels a highly valued recreational and commercial fishery in New England, spawns in the Gulf of Mexico from April to June and then migrates north for the summer, mixing with eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean stocks.

NOAA Fisheries has intensified their regular larval surveys and satellite tracking in the Gulf of Mexico to monitor the impact on bluefin. “We are very concerned,” said Guillermo Diaz, a research fisheries biologist with the NOAA Fisheries in Silver Spring, Maryland, “We are not taking this lightly. It’s a dynamic situation changing on a daily basis.”

Molly Lutcavage, an expert on bluefin tuna who runs the Large Pelagics Research Laboratory, formerly of University of New Hampshire and now of University of Massachusetts, said that only two bluefin spawning areas have been documented in the western Atlantic ocean. Both are in the Gulf of Mexico and one is directly in line with the oil spill impact zone. “If bluefin eggs and larvae come in direct contact with surface oil, it will kill them,” according to Lutcavage, “while slightly older larvae and juvenile tuna could die from indirect effects through ingesting copepods or other prey.” Diaz confirms the potential for damage, “It is very difficult to predict the impact on bluefin tuna at this point, but it could be significant.” Lutcavage does emphasize that over half of the bluefin tagged in the Gulf of Maine and Atlantic Canada each summer don’t visit the Gulf of Mexico in their annual migrations, which may provide an ‘escape hatch’ for the species to survive the spill.

Other species, including sharks, rays, swordfish, molas, black sea bass, tilefish, triggerfish, sea turtles and whales occasionally visit both gulfs. Researchers have been working for years to understand the annual migrations of right whales, humpback whales, sperm whales, leatherback turtles, loggerhead turtles and Kemp’s ridley turtles that are seasonal Gulf of Maine residents, but at this point the extent of migration to the Gulf of Mexico remains uncertain for all of these highly protected species.

Gordon Waring, of NOAA Fisheries Protected Species Branch in Woods Hole, Mass., notes that “Right whales migrate between winter calving grounds off the Florida and Georgia coasts and the greater Gulf of Maine. They are infrequently sighted in the Gulf of Mexico, and it is possible that those animals are among the group that feeds in the greater Gulf of Maine region in spring and summer”.

As with right whales, south-migrating humpback whales have been recorded in the Gulf of Mexico occassionally, said Keith Mullin from NOAA’s Southeast Fishery Science Center. Mullin also noted that male sperm whales leave the Gulf of Mexico and travel to northern latitudes and are occasionally seen in the Gulf of Maine region.

Sea turtles, including leatherback, loggerhead, and Kemp’s Ridley spend summer months in the Gulf of Maine feasting on jellyfish and salps. Tagging studies and DNA typing continue to shed light on whether these seasonal visitors spend their winters in the Gulf of Mexico, or in other nesting areas along the southeast U.S. and throughout the Carribean, but at this point the answer is not well known. Lutcavage, from UMass, notes that unlike bluefin tuna, which are highly attuned to chemical signals in the water, turtles may be less able to sense and avoid oiled areas, and may thus be more heavily impacted. In what’s being called an “unprecedented intervention,” the US Fish & Wildlife service and state wildlife officials are moving sea turtle eggs from Gulf of Mexico beaches to the Atlantic side of the Florida coast.

Above the sea, many Gulf of Maine birds are migratory, stopping on their seasonal migrations between nesting grounds in Boreal and Arctic Canada and the Southeastern US, Central and South America.

“This spill happened in one of the worst places possible from a bird-centric view,” said Jeff Wells of the Boreal Songbird Initiative. In a blog post in June, Wells outlined the impacts of the oil on bird species.

Wells anticipates that as summer progresses into fall, birds migrating south will intersect with the oil slick. Species that breed in the Northern Forest but migrate to the Gulf of Mexico for the winter, including mallard, Northern pintail, green-winged teal, American wigeon, ring-necked duck and greater and lesser scaup, face a “ticking time bomb,” according to Wells.

Wells said shorebirds that pepper Maine’s beaches in spring and fall, such as black-bellied and semipalmated plover, yellowlegs, solitary and least sandpipers, dunlin, short-billed dowitcher and Wilson’s snipe, will stop in the Gulf of Mexico to rest and feed before continuing down to their winter homes in the Caribbean and South America.

While the transport of oil to Maine shores appears unlikely, the effects of the oil on species that spend time in the Gulf of Maine may be substantial.

This article is made possible, in part, by funds from Maine Sea Grant and the Oak Foundation. Heather Deese holds a doctorate in oceanography and is the Island Institute’s director of marine programs. Catherine Schmitt is communications coordinator for Maine Sea Grant.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://washingtonindependent.com/93666/administration-defends-use-of-dispersants-after-oil-spill

By ANDREW RESTUCCIA 8/4/10 11:19 AM

At a Senate hearing today, Obama administration officials defended BP’s use of dispersants to break up oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

Testifying before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Paul Anastas, assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development, said that the agency allowed dispersants in the Gulf only after much consideration. “The decision to use dispersants was a decision not taken lightly,” Anastas said, adding later, “That said, when you look at all of the tools to combat this tragedyŠdispersants have been shown to be one important tool in that toolbox.”

David Westerholm, director of the Office of Response and Restoration at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, compared using dispersants to treating a fast moving, potentially fatal disease like cancer. Long-term research might give doctors more information about the disease and better, less risky ways to fight it, but “at the moment in time, you have to make that decision.”

The administration’s comments come as Rep. Edward Markey and others have raised serious concerns about the use of dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico to respond to the oil spill, arguing that the chemicals used are toxic and could have negative impacts on human health and the environment. At the same time, EPA this week released the results of an analysis of dispersants that found oil mixed with dispersants has a similar toxicity to oil alone.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://chronicle.com/article/Government-Estimates-of-Oil/123766/

August 4, 2010

In the early days of the oil spill that followed the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, university researchers helped disprove corporate and governmental assurances about the size and spread of the oil slick. Could that be happening again?

The rig, which was owned by Transocean Ltd. and leased to BP, was destroyed in the explosion on April 20, causing oil to spew from a ruptured well a mile below the surface.
The federal government on Wednesday issued a report saying that 4.9 million barrels of oil, plus or minus 10 percent, had leaked from the well from the time of the explosion until it was capped on July 15. The report also says that most of that oil has been captured, dispersed, or evaporated, leaving only 26 percent of it remaining in a form that could cause damage to the waters or coastlines.

But the report contains few details of how the government arrived at those figures, and it’s already producing some skepticism about whether the numbers will hold up.

Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, said the government’s report leaves open a lot of basic questions about what measurements it used and what calculations it applied.

“There are not sufficient details provided to be able to evaluate the accuracies of the estimates,” said Mr. Bea, who has more than 55 years of engineering experience with offshore platforms, mostly in private industry.

And the 10-percent margin of error “seems to be incredibly small” given all the variables involved, said Mr. Bea, who has asked the Deepwater Horizon Study Group at Berkeley to make a careful review of the figures.

-Paul Basken

Special thanks to Richard Charter

The 64 million dollar question is can we trust this expert report? Who contributed the evidence to support the findings in this report? Same goes for the expected “earlier lifting” of ban on offshore oil exploration. This is 2010, but it makes me think of “1984”, where “doublespeak” and “doublethink’ ruled supreme. Are there any reports from scientists or coral reef or marine research organizations, institutes or networks which corroborate or refute these findings?
Milton Ponson, President
Rainbow Warriors Core Foundation
(Rainbow Warriors International) Tel. +297 568 5908
PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
Email: southern_caribbean@yahoo.com http://www.rainbowwarriors.net

A second comment from the Coral-list today, Aug. 5:
Just a little remainder that the Gulf of Mexico is the 9th largest body of water in the planet, and the only way to know exactly how much oil remains from the BP oil spill is to obtain data on site, both on the surface and throughout the water column at a systematic number of stations throughout the Gulf, and through time. So that means, extensive space and time coverage.
There have been a few brave oceanographers working on shoestring budgets that have managed to divert their research vessels to survey “ground zero” and have detected subsurface plumes (and we know how much denial they encountered at first). But the spatial and temporal coverage, with hard data in hand, is not there yet.
So after reading the findings of the new report, we must demand: Show me the data. I mean, the raw data, the data that apparently, without anyone knowing, and perhaps with a flotilla of ghost oceanographic ships, and an army of oceanographers and marine biologists working 24/7 have been collected during the last 106 days. Then, once we have the data freely available to all researchers, and after we analyze those data, perhaps we can have a better idea of where the oil is, and what the impact has been and will be to the marine ecosystem.
Until then, it will be hard to believe a word of that report.
Sarah Frias-Torres, Ph.D. http://independent.academia.edu/SarahFriasTorres

published August 4, 2010

by Justin Gillis

WASHINGTON — The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.

A government report finds that about 26 percent of the oil released from BP’s runaway well is still in the water or onshore in a form that could, in principle, cause new problems. But most is light sheen at the ocean surface or in a dispersed form below the surface, and federal scientists believe that it is breaking down rapidly in both places.

On Tuesday, BP began pumping drilling mud into the well in an attempt to seal it for good. Since the flow of oil was stopped with a cap on July 15, people on the Gulf Coast have been wondering if another shoe was going to drop — a huge underwater glob of oil emerging to damage more shorelines, for instance.

Assuming that the government’s calculations stand scrutiny, that looks increasingly unlikely. “There’s absolutely no evidence that there’s any significant concentration of oil that’s out there that we haven’t accounted for,” said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the lead agency in producing the new report.

She emphasized, however, that the government remained concerned about the ecological damage that has already occurred and the potential for more, and said it would continue monitoring the gulf.

“I think we don’t know yet the full impact of this spill on the ecosystem or the people of the gulf,” Dr. Lubchenco said.

Among the biggest unanswered questions, she said, is how much damage the oil has done to the eggs and larvae of organisms like fish, crabs and shrimp. That may not become clear for a year or longer, as new generations of those creatures come to maturity.

Thousands of birds and other animals are known to have been damaged or killed by the spill, a relatively modest toll given the scale of some other oil disasters that killed millions of animals. Efforts are still under way in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida to clean up more than 600 miles of oiled shoreline. The government and BP collected 35,818 tons of oily debris from shorelines through Sunday.

It remains to be seen whether subtle, long-lasting environmental damage from the spill will be found, as has been the case after other large oil spills.

The report, which is to be unveiled on Wednesday morning, is a result of an extensive effort by federal scientists, with outside help, to add up the total volume of oil released and to figure out where it went.

The lead agency behind the report, the oceanic and atmospheric administration, played down the size of the spill in the early days, and the Obama administration was ultimately forced to appoint a scientific panel that came up with far higher estimates of the flow rate from the well. Whether the new report will withstand critical scrutiny is uncertain; advocacy groups and most outside scientists had not learned of it on Tuesday.

The government announced early this week that the total oil release, from the time the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20 until the well was effectively capped, was 4.9 million barrels, plus or minus 10 percent. That estimate makes the Deepwater Horizon disaster the largest marine spill in history. It is surpassed on land by a 1910 spill in the California desert.

As the scientists did their calculations, they were able to rely on direct measurements of the fate of some of the oil that spewed from the broken well. For example, BP and its contractors succeeded in capturing about 17 percent of it with various containment mechanisms, the report says.

The outcome for much of the oil could not be directly measured, but had to be estimated using protocols that were scrutinized by scientists inside and outside the government, Dr. Lubchenco said.

The report calculates, for example, that about 25 percent of the chemicals in the oil evaporated at the surface or dissolved into seawater in the same way that sugar dissolves in tea. (The government appears to have settled on a conservative number for that estimate, with the scientific literature saying that as much as 40 percent of the oil from a spill can disappear in this way.)

The aggressive response mounted by BP and the government — the largest in history, ultimately involving more than 5,000 vessels — also played a role in getting rid of the oil, the report says. Fully 5 percent of the oil was burned at the surface, it estimates, while 3 percent was skimmed and 8 percent was broken up into tiny droplets using chemical dispersants. Another 16 percent dispersed naturally as the oil shot out of the well at high speed.

All told, the report calculates that about 74 percent of the oil has been effectively dealt with by capture, burning, skimming, evaporation, dissolution or dispersion. Much of the dissolved and dispersed oil can be expected to break down in the environment, though federal scientists are still working to establish the precise rate at which that is happening.

“I think we are fortunate in this situation that the rates of degradation in the gulf ecosystem are quite high,” Dr. Lubchenco said.

The remaining 26 percent of the oil “is on or just below the surface as light sheen or weathered tar balls, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments,” the report says.

Some fishermen in Louisiana are worried about the buried oil, fearing that storms could stir it up and coat vital shrimp or oyster grounds, a possibility the government has not ruled out.

Testing of fish has shown little cause for worry so far, and fishing grounds in the gulf are being reopened at a brisk clip. At one point the government had closed 36 percent of federal gulf waters to fishing, but that figure is now down to 24 percent and is expected to drop further in coming weeks.

States are also reopening fishing grounds near their coasts. The big economic question now is whether the American public is ready to buy gulf seafood again.

The new government report comes as BP engineers began pumping heavy drilling mud into the stricken well on Tuesday, with the hope of achieving a permanent seal or at least revealing critical clues about how to kill the well before the end of the month.

Through the afternoon, in what is known as a static kill, engineers pumped mud weighing about 13.2 pounds per gallon at slow speeds from a surface vessel through a pipe into the blowout preventer on top of the well. If all goes well, cement may be applied over the next few days. But officials said they could be confident the well was plugged only when one of two relief wells now being drilled was completed, allowing the well to be completely sealed with cement.

“The static kill will increase the probability that the relief well will work,” Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who is leading the federal spill response effort, told reporters on Tuesday. “But the whole thing will not be done until the relief well is completed.”

The static kill operation could last for close to three days. After it is completed, work can resume on the final 100 feet of the first relief well, which officials say should be completed by Aug. 15 unless bad weather intervenes.

Special thanks to Coral-list.