Underwater Lakes Of Oil From BP Spill Will Continue To Cover Gulf Beaches With Toxic Layer Of Invisible Oil For Months

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As Washington’s Blog reports BP Gulf Oil Spill Clean Up Workers are having a heard time finding crude floating on the surface because BP has used dispersants to sink the oil beneath the surface.

News headlines state that cleanup workers are having a hard time finding oil.

Sounds good, right?

Actually, if BP had let things run their course:

* Oil-skimming vessels could have sucked up most of the oil

* Booms would have stopped most of the oil from hitting the shore

* And oil-eating bacteria would have broken down most of the remaining oil

Instead, BP has used millions of gallons of dispersants to hide the oil by breaking it up, so it sinks beneath the surface.

That means that oil-skimming vessels can’t find it or suck it up.

But as Washington points out that doesn’t mean the oil has magically disappeared as the media is widely reporting.

Experts: Gulf of Mexico Oil is Breaking Up

The light crude began to deteriorate the moment it escaped at high pressure, and then it was zapped with dispersants to speed the process along. The oil that did make it to the ocean’s surface was broken up by 88-degree water, baked by 100-degree sun, eaten by microbes, and whipped apart by wind and waves.

To the contrary has I have pointed out several times as little as 2% of the oil released in the BP Gulf Oil spill may make it to the surface.

The study called  Project “Deep Spill” was first a black eye for BP and the Federal Government when they claimed it didn’t make sense that there where huge plumes oil floating in the ambient currents beneath the surface of the sea because as they put it “oil floats”.

Project “Deep Spill” is now hitting them with another black eye and debunks the lie that the methane gas being released from the well is floating to the surface and not being absorbed into the sea.

The study analyzed a wide range of controlled releases at different depths below the sea surface of different types of oil found all over world to help better understand the flow of hydrocarbons released from a deepwater blowout.

One of the studies, called DeepBlow, released 10,000 barrels of oil per day at a depth of 800 meters which is less than half of the depth of the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

The basic findings of that study has been recreated by scientists from the University of North Carolina.

In their research the scientists simulated of the formation of the underwater oil plumes that are created during deepwater blowouts.

Watch The University of North Caroline Simulation Showing How Oil Released Underwater Forms Plumes

In particular the final report of Project “Deep Spill” found:

1. Only 2% of the oil released in a deepwater blowout may actually make it to the surface. That’s as little as 2% naturally without the use of dispersants. Add dispersants into the equation and it could be less then one percent of oil that makes it to the surface.
2. None of the methane released from the deepwater blowout made it to the surface. The study found that released natural gas may dissolve completely within the water column if it is released from a deep enough depth relative to the gas flow rate.From the study of the 800 meter release:
   

   Echo sounders provided efficient tracking of oil and gas releases in the field and showed that the gas was completely dissolved before it could surface.

   DeepBlow does not include hydrate kinetics, and hence, under hydrate forming conditions, the model predicts solid hydrate particles. Not only is the mass transfer from such particles slower than from gas bubbles, but also hydrate density is closer to that of water than that of natural gas, substantially reducing plume buoyancy.

3. The buoyant parts of the oil released in a deepwater blowout split from the main plume within the first 200 meters of release. Those buoyant parts, which represent only a small portion of the total amount of oil, turn into small droplets that float to the surface.Here is a graph from the study showing this process.
   
   Deepwater oil release – Buoyancy particle separation graph

   Here is an image that captures the separation process

   
   Deepwater oil release – Buoyancy particle separation simulation
4. Within the first 100 to 200 meters from the source of the release the the majority of the oil loses its buoyancy and stops rising. This majority of the oil remains submerged in an underwater plume that is then carried away by subsurface currents.
   
   Deepwater oil plumes lose buoyancy within the first few couple hundred meters from release
5. Oil plumes released from deepwater plumes can travel for long distances. It is uncertain if or where they will surface unless they are tracked.
   
   Deepwater oil plumes travel for long distances
6. A snippet from the study:
   

   Based on the models, the experimental studies described in Section 2 and, to a limited extent, the DeepSpill experiment described in Section 3, an accidental release of oil and/or natural gas obeys the following staged pattern. Near the release, oil, gas and entrained seawater rise as a coherent buoyant plume. A few meters above a point-source release, ambient conditions begin to affect the plume: crossflows cause the plume to deflect in the downstream direction and stratification retards the upward plume motion by entrainment of ambient seawater. For cases similar to the DeepSpill experiment, at a height of order 100 m, these ambient effects arrest the plume, and cause the entrained seawater and the dispersed phases to separate. The arrest takes the form of a completely bent over plume in the case of a strong crossflow, or a trap height and intrusion in the case of a stratification dominated plume. At this terminal level, there is rapid spreading, either by advection from the crossflow or gravitational collapse of the intrusion layer, and the oil is distributed over a wide area. Above this trapping zone, the oil rises as individual droplets.

Recently a NOAA expedition by the Gordon Hunter has confirmed that there are massive underwater lakes of oil floating beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico because as a top level whistle blower at the EPA points out the Federal Government has allowed BP to use toxic dispersants to save BP billions in fines.

7. Volume visualization

This report summarizes sensor data from AUV surveys conducted on June 2 – 3, when optical and chemical measurements indicated hydrocarbon detection in a plume-like feature below 1000 meters depth. Physical samples were acquired from this feature by ship and AUV sampling systems, and NOAA is managing shore-based laboratory analyses of these samples. When results from these analyses are available, more complete interpretation of the deep feature mapped by the AUV will be possible, including identification of chemical composition, concentration ranges, and source (wellhead or natural seafloor seep).

NOAA Confirms Huge Underwater Lakes Of Oil 1100 Meters Beneath Surface Of Gulf

The illustration above shows the deep plume-like feature mapped by the MBARI AUV Dorado on June 3, 2010. The data and methods used to describe this feature are summarized in this report. The brown hues of the feature represent the tea-like colors of Colored Dissolved Organic Matter (CDOM) because CDOM fluorometry was the basis for feature detection, data analysis and visualization.

As NOAA pointed out in the Brooks McCall report the oil trapped in these underwater lakes of oil will take months to surface.

Review of R/V Brooks McCall Data to Examine Subsurface Oil

Background

This report presents a preliminary analyses of data collected by the R/V Brooks McCall near the site of the Deepwater Horizon MC252 (DWH-MC252) wellhead between May 8 and May 25, 2010. During this timeframe the DWH-MC252 wellhead was releasing gas and oil in a turbulent mixture from the broken riser pipe attached to the well. Throughout the data collection period, a plume of oil and gas continually rose from the wellhead with some oil reaching the surface in about three hours. During the trip to the surface, it is expected that some of the oil dissolved in the water column and some formed droplets. The pressure that propelled the oil out of the wellhead was strong enough to cause some of the oil to form water-in-oil emulsion, or mousse.

Dispersing oil at depth, either naturally or chemically, has the effect of breaking up the oil into small droplets within the water column. Because dispersed oil droplets vary in both size and buoyancy, droplets of different sizes take different lengths of time to rise to the water’s surface. Very small droplets, less than about 100 μm in diameter, rise to the surface so slowly that ocean turbulence is likely strong enough to keep them mixed within the water column for at least several months.

So that means that even though there is no oil visible on the surface of the Gulf layers of toxic oil invisible to the naked eye will continue to wash up on Gulf beaches for months.

In fact an ABC 3 Wear TV Report confirms that while there is no longer visible oil washing up on Pensacola beach an invisible layer of toxic oil from the BP Gulf Oil Spill continues to cover Pensacola Beach.

PENSACOLA BEACH – There appears to be a lot less oil washing up on Pensacola Beach lately. But what about the oil you can’t see?

Dan Thomas joins us now with a Channel Three news investigation.

Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Rip Kirby has spent the last few years studying Northwest Florida beaches.

He’s a Coastal Geologist with the University of South Florida.

When we first met him a few weeks ago, he showed us this… Sheets of oil under the sand, covered by the outgoing tide.

“Buried Tar and it’s constant.”
But lately, less oil has been washing up, and chances are if you dig today, you won’t see it.

Dan Thomas/[email protected]: “The Escambia Health Department says if you can see oil, you should avoid contact with it and take a look out here on the Gulf Islands National Seashore there’s really no oil to be seen, that is until you use the UV light. When you shine it on the sand, just like a sheen on the water, it’s there.”

Through the filter of our camera, the sugar white sand becomes blue and what Kirby says is oil, becomes white.

Rip Kirby/USF Coastal Geologist: “So if you just literally, see the oil under neath it.”

Rip Kirby/USF Coastal Geologist: “This is from somebody’s tire track, it just fell off.”

Rip Kirby/USF Coastal Geologist: “The particular oil product that’s in here, was blown there.”

Rip Kirby/USF Coastal Geologist: “This is where people scrape their feet. See all the oil right there?”

The stuff was everywhere, a few inches into the sand, a light dusting on top and still more washing in.

Rip Kirby/USF Coastal Geologist: “There’s no contamination with the white light, only with the UV light. So during the day if some one came out here and sat in the sand, they’re going to get oil product on them just from sitting in the sand. The question becomes how long can they sit in the sand and have it touch their skin and have them lay on the sand with simply a cotton towel between them and this, breathing it before it becomes a toxic problem for them to deal with 20 years from now when they have some kind of cancer? The answer to that is, I don’t know.”

Rip Kirby/USF Coastal Geologist: “We haven’t seen and I’ve been looking for it for six weeks now and I have not seen a report that tells me the chemical constituents of the oil product that’s in the beach sand.”

We put a call in to BP… They say they’re working on getting us that report.
So far we haven’t seen it either.

Watch the ABC video report showing that even though there is no visible oil on the surface a toxic layer of invisible oil continues to cover Pensacola Beach.

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• BP Paying Off Universities And Gulf Scientists In Mass To Hide Oil Spill Research Data From The Public
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