© Medical Daily
When oil began gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, it was universally seen as an environmental disaster. Oil company British Petroleum, or BP, has been asked to pay a record $4.5 billion fine for their role in the three-month long spill, which some sources say may still be leaking. However, it seems that was just the tip of the iceberg.
A study conducted by researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States and the Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes (UAA) in Mexico has found that the clean-up mission appears to have made the disaster even worse - 52 times worse, to be exact.
Over the course of the three months that oil was leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, 4.9 billion gallons of oil spilled into the gulf. In order to clean it up, two million gallons of oil dispersant were used. According to the study, the mixture of oil and dispersant made the spill 52 times more toxic.
The study, published in the journal Environmental Pollution, came to this conclusion by looking at rotifers, microscopic organisms at the bottom of the Gulf's food chain. The five types of rotifers were used for this experiment because rotifers are very sensitive to toxicity and react quickly to changes in environment.
Researchers found that when rotifers were exposed to oil-dispersant mixtures, they died extremely quickly. They also found that as little as 2.6 percent of the oil-dispersant mixture prevented rotifer eggs from hatching by 50 percent. The finding about rotifer eggs was particularly distressing for researchers because rotifer eggs hatch each spring into rotifers, providing food for baby fish, shrimp, and crabs.
"Dispersants are preapproved to help clean up oil spills and are widely used during disasters," study leader, Robert Martinez, from UAA said in a statement. "But we have a poor understanding of their toxicity. Our study indicates the increase in toxicity may have been greatly underestimated following the Macondo well explosion."
"What remains to be determined is whether the benefits of dispersing the oil by using Corexit are outweighed by the substantial increase in toxicity of the mixture. Perhaps we should allow the oil to naturally disperse. It might take longer, but it would have less toxic impact on marine ecosystems," added Terry Snell, a study author and the chair of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Realtime Complaints back then...
The dispersant did one thing (it made the slick harder to find. - And harder to quantify the amount of oil lost.) What is easier to clean up a spill of a bunch of one gallon tar globs? Or a the each same tar glob spread over an acre of ocean, as a sheen?
Indeed, on What really happened, they had a link that showed that the "realtime" oil spill cam was re-looping itself (using the times when less was leaking and re playing them.)
The whole thing is that the BP flunkies worried about what they could get away with (which was even more and better than they imagined.)
And of course, Big Dick Cheney's companies bought out the biggest oil spill cleanup company about 6 weeks before the blowout became public... some peon workers had to die for effect, of course but somehow, none of the executives were there... duh.) Man, these new world order coincidences can be so amazing.
See, for example WHY pot was made illegal? So that they could make money on a patent to turn wood into paper. After all, there were all these huge forests to be destroyed. Research hemp, "yellow journalism" Hearst.
I .... get angry about the SOB's behind all this and this apparent attempt (much like DU - why spread all this carcinogenic microdust around?) The goal seems to be to really make This Beautiful Earth unliveable.
Why? Only one obvious answer comes to mind. Read Charles Fort's "Book of the Damned," (1902? - so it's free online.) The answer: "We're owned property. Fought over and won long ago, and marked off as "Ours" by something/someone, which finds and feels that the most important - to them - assets which this earth has are akin to the bird and critter nests that get in the way of "progress" when "we" chop down forests.
So it's been broken a long time. But in the history we are aware of, never has a mankind had anything like the PRESENT opportunity to real time see the real truth. And what are we doing about it?
Bitching here, but that ain't much, though it's likely enough to get us to where we'll meet at a camp somewhere - so long as we are "useful."
But. per Dylan, that's better than nada...and I agree.
Hard Rain's Gonna Fall (excerpts)
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it's hard and it's hard and it's hard and it's hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall
I heard the sound of a thunder as it roared out a warning
I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazing
I heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening
I heard one person starve I heard many people laughing
Oh what'll you do now my blue eyed son
Oh what'll you do now my darling young one
I'm going back out before the rain starts a-falling
Where I'll walk to the depth of the deepest dark forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly where souls are forgotten
Where black is the colour and none is the number
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it
And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking
But I'll know my song well before I start singing
And it's hard and it's hard and it's hard and it's hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall [Link]
R.C.