Deep Sea Horizon (BP Oil Spill)

[MetalHead]

Today I flew home from Orlando,FL.
At one point during the flight,I noticed a fire burning up in open sea..I told my wife to come and look at this(I suspected it to be the BP oil spill deal).I was correct,the captain piloting the plane instructed everyone who could to look out the left side of the plane and see it.
You could see about a dozen large ships around it,but to be honest,it did not look like that big of a deal.I expected to see a Gulf of Mexico covered in oil,death everywhere,just like the media wants us to think.
Not even close.it is a small speck in the vast gulf.Life will go on.
It is sad to see wildlife perish needlessly,but I assure you,mother nature will prevail.

 

[SaltwaterServr]

Today I flew home from Orlando,FL.
At one point during the flight,I noticed a fire burning up in open sea..I told my wife to come and look at this(I suspected it to be the BP oil spill deal).I was correct,the captain piloting the plane instructed everyone who could to look out the left side of the plane and see it.
You could see about a dozen large ships around it,but to be honest,it did not look like that big of a deal.I expected to see a Gulf of Mexico covered in oil,death everywhere,just like the media wants us to think.
Not even close.it is a small speck in the vast gulf.Life will go on.
It is sad to see wildlife perish needlessly,but I assure you,mother nature will prevail.

It only takes a few drops of oil to contaminate a million gallons of water to the point that it is unsafe to drink by humans.

The hydrocarbon contamination doesn't have to be hundreds of square miles of open water layered with streaks of thick viscous material to kill an abundance of the phyto and zoo plankton species living in the area affected by it.

This video also shows that it is impacting far inland.

[youtube]oqPF9dtCc9g[/youtube]

 

[MetalHead]

It only takes a few drops of oil to contaminate a million gallons of water to the point that it is unsafe to drink by humans.

The hydrocarbon contamination doesn't have to be hundreds of square miles of open water layered with streaks of thick viscous material to kill an abundance of the phyto and zoo plankton species living in the area affected by it.

This video also shows that it is impacting far inland.

[youtube]oqPF9dtCc9g[/youtube]

Don't get me wrong,it is still an unfortunate event.But put in perspective,it looks like drop in a bucket.There was a 9 month oil disaster in the gulf in 1980,last time I checked,Cancun was still there.
I'm telling you what I saw unfiltered by the media.

 

[SaltwaterServr]

Don't get me wrong,it is still an unfortunate event.But put in perspective,it looks like drop in a bucket.There was a 9 month oil disaster in the gulf in 1980,last time I checked,Cancun was still there.
I'm telling you what I saw unfiltered by the media.

The spill in the 70's, the Ixtoc, still kicks massive tar mats on the beaches of Texas, the currents don't really affect Cancun IIRC from that spill. When I was at UT Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas one of the grad students was doing testing on some new samples that had come in to see if they were still from that spill. That spill had decades long effects. Decades.

The herring fishery of Prince William Sound has never recovered to become a viable commercial fishery, and it's been 20+ years.

There are possibly hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil that never sees the surface of the GOM either. They are trapped in subsurface layers of stratification within the water column. NOAA has been tracking them as well.

I think the largest submerged plume was 3 miles by 10 miles, 300 feet thick. It only takes a few drops to contaminate a million gallons.

Not to mention, I'm not sure how much you'd be able to see out of an airplane anyways. Was this a few weeks ago, or before Alex and another pair of tropical storms tossed and rolled the GOM into a washing machine?

EDIT: Saw your original post that it was today. Those storms have done A LOT to disperse the slicks. Took and pushed some oil into Texas against all the currents going the other direction.

 

[CF74]

30,000 ft in the air with binoculars right?

 

[Aikbach]

A tanker of oil leaks into Santa Barabra's shores annually by natural means, the ocean has filtration that will rectify the temporal havoc of a man caused spill.

31 years ago people declared Texas shores dead from a spill that saturated the sand into a tar pit from a 30,000 barrel a day spill. Within 18 months people were swimming in the water again on vacation and fishing was back to normal within nine months.

So long as government doesn't get too reactionary things will improve to normalcy much quicker than you think.

 

[Hoofbite]

30,000 ft in the air with binoculars right?

hahaha.

 

[SaltwaterServr]

A tanker of oil leaks into Santa Barabra's shores annually by natural means, the ocean has filtration that will rectify the temporal havoc of a man caused spill.

31 years ago people declared Texas shores dead from a spill that saturated the sand into a tar pit from a 30,000 barrel a day spill. Within 18 months people were swimming in the water again on vacation and fishing was back to normal within nine months.

So long as government doesn't get too reactionary things will improve to normalcy much quicker than you think.

With all due respect, the Texas beaches affected were only the outlying barrier islands. The sand was scooped up by front end loader and trucked out to land fills. Fishing wasn't back to normal in nine months either. The spill itself lasted ten months.

The effects we're seeing in Louisiana are directly tied to the oil penetrating into the marshes and estuarine areas. Those are the nursery areas for thousands of species of animals from sharks that pup in the back bays to the American oyster. All of those areas are contaminated.

The southern and central Texas coast has a limited number of inlets into our estuaries. Off the top of my head south of Houston is one or two at Surfside, then the two cuts into Matagorda bay at Port O'Connor, Cedar Bayou, Port Aransas, the Port Mansfield cut, and the last at Port Isabel.

That's 8 entry points in hundreds of miles of beach in Texas. In Louisiana there are thousands of entry points into the estuaries. It's a completely different animal.

 

[Aikbach]

With all due respect, the Texas beaches affected were only the outlying barrier islands. The sand was scooped up by front end loader and trucked out to land fills. Fishing wasn't back to normal in nine months either. The spill itself lasted ten months.

The effects we're seeing in Louisiana are directly tied to the oil penetrating into the marshes and estuarine areas. Those are the nursery areas for thousands of species of animals from sharks that pup in the back bays to the American oyster. All of those areas are contaminated.

The southern and central Texas coast has a limited number of inlets into our estuaries. Off the top of my head south of Houston is one or two at Surfside, then the two cuts into Matagorda bay at Port O'Connor, Cedar Bayou, Port Aransas, the Port Mansfield cut, and the last at Port Isabel.

That's 8 entry points in hundreds of miles of beach in Texas. In Louisiana there are thousands of entry points into the estuaries. It's a completely different animal.

Evidence to the contrary abounds:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/12/95793/ixtoc-the-gulfs-other-massive.html

 

[SaltwaterServr]

Evidence to the contrary abounds:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/12/95793/ixtoc-the-gulfs-other-massive.html

About which part? The fact that Texas's beaches were a few hundred miles of sand that could be easily cleaned or the fact that Louisiana has thousands of miles of a much more fragile system that is being impacted?

The part where we were:

"Texas just made a superhuman effort to keep the oil away from rivers, with two or three or four layers of booms to skim it away,'' said Thomas C. Shirley, a biodiversity specialist at Texas A&M Corpus Christi. "We know how to clean up beaches, and it's simple. It's just sand."

or the part where the article immediately contradicts itself:

"That's how we are, always talking about the one that got away. But the truth is, after maybe nine months or so, it was back to normal.''

vs.

It wasn't until the late-1980s that the population of Kemp's Ridley turtles, which lay a couple of hundred eggs a year, as opposed to the millions produced by shrimp, started recovering. The immediate losses from an oil spill continue to ricochet through larger species for generations.

In one quote, a local fisherman, is saying 9 months was all it took. In another point, it's showing that there was an impact of close to 20 years.

All of that was from a spill that never reached into the estuaries of Texas, only the outlying barrier islands. And even a great deal of that was washed out by hurricane out of sheer luck and/or pick up by front end loader.

Completely different scenario. In our case in Texas you could do the clean up with a shovel and a trash can on the high tide line. In Louisiana your up to your *** in the marshes, cleaning individual stems of grass.

Our barrier intertidal region is in no way comparable to a marsh estuarine zone. There is almost no comparable dynamic between them other than they are influenced by the tides. You could honestly write volumes of books on the differences between the two types of ecosystems. Volumes.

 

[Aikbach]

About which part? The fact that Texas's beaches were a few hundred miles of sand that could be easily cleaned or the fact that Louisiana has thousands of miles of a much more fragile system that is being impacted?

The part where we were:

"Texas just made a superhuman effort to keep the oil away from rivers, with two or three or four layers of booms to skim it away,'' said Thomas C. Shirley, a biodiversity specialist at Texas A&M Corpus Christi. "We know how to clean up beaches, and it's simple. It's just sand."

or the part where the article immediately contradicts itself:

"That's how we are, always talking about the one that got away. But the truth is, after maybe nine months or so, it was back to normal.''

vs.

It wasn't until the late-1980s that the population of Kemp's Ridley turtles, which lay a couple of hundred eggs a year, as opposed to the millions produced by shrimp, started recovering. The immediate losses from an oil spill continue to ricochet through larger species for generations.

In one quote, a local fisherman, is saying 9 months was all it took. In another point, it's showing that there was an impact of close to 20 years.

All of that was from a spill that never reached into the estuaries of Texas, only the outlying barrier islands. And even a great deal of that was washed out by hurricane out of sheer luck and/or pick up by front end loader.

Completely different scenario. In our case in Texas you could do the clean up with a shovel and a trash can on the high tide line. In Louisiana your up to your *** in the marshes, cleaning individual stems of grass.

Our barrier intertidal region is in no way comparable to a marsh estuarine zone. There is almost no comparable dynamic between them other than they are influenced by the tides. You could honestly write volumes of books on the differences between the two types of ecosystems. Volumes.

Point is relative normalcy will return, hurricanes and disasters will happen continuously in the region wrecking havoc, oil will spill naturally from the earth and once every thirty years people will screw up.

So get on with your life just as the gulf will, you don't control the weather or the flukeish once in a generation accidents that occur and the region survives them all.

 

[MetalHead]

A tanker of oil leaks into Santa Barabra's shores annually by natural means, the ocean has filtration that will rectify the temporal havoc of a man caused spill.

31 years ago people declared Texas shores dead from a spill that saturated the sand into a tar pit from a 30,000 barrel a day spill. Within 18 months people were swimming in the water again on vacation and fishing was back to normal within nine months.

So long as government doesn't get too reactionary things will improve to normalcy much quicker than you think.

I agree with you.
Nature itself is powerful and has a way to heal itself.
The exaggeration in reporting and the desire for catastrophe by some media outlets paint a different picture.They need bad news for good ratings numbers.
The gulf will be ok.

 

[SilverStarCowboy]

The gulf will be ok.

Yeah in about 40 years or so.

 

[Maikeru-sama]

People still trying to downplay the BP oil spill?

Shocking :laugh2: .

 

[MetalHead]

Yeah in about 40 years or so.

Lot sooner than that.

 

[MetalHead]

People still trying to downplay the BP oil spill?

Shocking :laugh2: .

Remember when Parcells said "don't eat the cheese"...?
No one is downplaying it.I'm sharing what I saw.
The media wants it to portrait it as the end of coastal wildlife,because you may or may not know,bad news equal good ratings.The worse the news are,the better ratings they get.When you fly over it,you can appreciate the relativity of size between the gulf and the spill,and if you understand nature,you'll realize that while tragic,this event is not the end of the gulf.

 

[Maikeru-sama]

Looks like we have some BP Stockholders in here :laugh2: .

 

[SDogo]

Gulf has an estimated 650 Quadrillion gallons

The Oil Spill is leaking at a rate of 1,470,000 gal/day and is currently at 88,201,935 (note this number changes so fast it will be outdated by the time I finish this post by several thousand gallons)

Now I know Quadrillion has a lot more zero's then million (9 to be exact) but it's still a scary thought.

Think about it 1,470,000 gallons a day.

I'm sorry, that's not small on any scale when your talking about toxic chemicals leaking into anything.

 

[Hoofbite]

Remember when Parcells said "don't eat the cheese"...?
No one is downplaying it.I'm sharing what I saw.
The media wants it to portrait it as the end of coastal wildlife,because you may or may not know,bad news equal good ratings.The worse the news are,the better ratings they get.When you fly over it,you can appreciate the relativity of size between the gulf and the spill,and if you understand nature,you'll realize that while tragic,this event is not the end of the gulf.

Rather than the media pumping everything up, I'd say it's far more likely that you have no clue what you were looking at or looking for. There are images from space that show it being bigger than a "drop in the bucket".

 

[MetalHead]

Rather than the media pumping everything up, I'd say it's far more likely that you have no clue what you were looking at or looking for. There are images from space that show it being bigger than a "drop in the bucket".

As far as I'm concerned,I have seen more than you.
Unadultered naked eye images and the general opinion of those aboard was in step with mine.