Soot in the Sky, Gas in the Water

[tabatha]

http://www.independent.com/news/2010/jul/24/soot-sky-gas-water/

UCSB scientist Dr. David Valentine — a marine geochemistry expert — returned earlier this month from a 10-day research cruise to the region. He and a team of graduate students studied microorganisms that survive solely on diets of methane and oil. The highly-adapted, single-celled bacteria — gobbling up oil and gas that was seeping from the broken drilling pipe — require oxygen to metabolize their unusual food.

It’s Valentine’s goal to better understand how rapidly the compounds are being consumed and how the process is contributing to the significant oxygen loss that’s been observed in the spill site and beyond. “So far, oxygen hasn’t run out for ,” said Valentine. “The concern is what’s going to happen moving forward. What we observed is that these organisms are definitely consuming the gases. We don’t have the data in yet about how rapidly that’s happening — that’s part of what we’re still working on. But we can say with certainty that there is enough gas present to continue to bring the oxygen down.” Should 02 levels drop low enough, larger animals will either die or avoid those areas.

His team also took a close look at how the hydrocarbon gases are distributed throughout the ocean — looking mainly at methane, ethane, and propane, which made up about half of the supercritical mass that was shooting out of the seabed — by sending down an instrument that collected water samples at 23 different depths. During these experiments, reported Valentine, the scientists were right in the thick of cleanup and abatement measures, witnessing close-up the massive surface burns and the swaths of oil slicks that dot the Gulf’s surface.

Valentine said he observed a 5-30 percent reduction in oxygen below 2,500 feet, which, although not enough to start killing off marine life outright, is nevertheless something to keep an eye on. And because the gases present around the spill site are around 100,000 times their normal levels, Valentine said the possibility of oxygen levels dropping to zero is not out of the realm of possibility if the bacteria’s reactions go to completion. “Once you get down to 80 percent, then you’re going to start seeing more significant problems," he said.

[Champion Jack]

1. It's all part of the plan, Skynet will prevail