Did you just see Rachael's story on Shell Oil rig in Alaska that has run aground?

[highplainsdem]

2. Yes, it's really scary. Arctic oil exploration could lead to an uncontrollable disaster. See these

links:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4985785

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/oil-exploration-under-arctic-ice-could-cause-uncontrollable-natural-disaster-2349788.html

The first is my Sept. 2011 LBN topic about that Guardian story. I've posted a lot of LBN topics, but this story was frightening enough that I haven't forgotten it.

I'll just copy my LBN OP below:

___________

Tue Sep-06-11 12:46 AM

Oil exploration under Arctic ice could cause 'uncontrollable' natural disaster

Source: The Independent

Oil from an undersea leak will not only be very hard to deal with in Arctic conditions, it will interact with the surface sea ice and become absorbed in it, and will be transported by it for as much as 1,000 miles across the ocean, according to Peter Wadhams, Professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.

The interaction, discovered in large-scale experiments 30 years ago, means that the Arctic oil rush, which was given a huge boost last week with a $3.2 billion (£1.9bn) investment from Exxon Mobil, is likely to be the riskiest form of oil exploration ever undertaken, said Professor Wadhams, who is a former director of Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute.

-snip-

"The oil is caught underneath the ice, so you can't get at immediately to clean it up or burn it off. You don't know exactly where it is, and then it gets encapsulated in the new ice which grows underneath, so you then have a kind of oil sandwich inside the pack ice.

"And that's being transported around the Arctic and isn't released until spring, when it may be several hundred or even a thousand miles from the source of the spill, so you can have a huge area of the Arctic becoming polluted by oil without initially it being clear where that oil is."

-snip-

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/oil-exploration-under-arctic-ice-could-cause-uncontrollable-natural-disaster-2349788.html

The article mentions the other risks of going after the oil in the Arctic -- "ice encroachment, the remoteness of the Arctic, darkness, extreme weather, deep water, high seas, freezing conditions and icebergs" -- but the most worrisome information here is about how the oil will interact with ice, and this information is based on a study done off the coast of Canada in the 1970s.

Not only would spilled oil be trapped in the ice and transported vast distances by it, but when it thaws it will be still be fresh oil because the ice will have kept it from weathering. And Professor Wadhams points out it will be released on the edges of pack ice, where migratory birds feed.