How science failed during the Gulf oil disaster | Hacker News Reader

How science failed during the Gulf oil disaster

arstechnica.com

17 pointsevo_97 comments

Missing from this article are all the scientists who took funding from BP in exchange for silence. Those scientists betrayed science as well.

Sample: http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/08/17/contract-gag-sil...

"We had just mapped an underwater plume with a one-of-a-kind underwater vehicle carrying a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer. It could be the greatest scientific contribution of my career. But the media wasn’t that interested. They were more concerned with whether the plume was toxic."

Ah, mad scientists. I love 'em. They're all, "I have a robot that maps underwater hydrocarbon plumes!" Everyone else is like, "Uh, is that stuff going to kill us?" and the mad scientist just goes, "You fools don't understand! I have a robot!"

Very bad title. Should be "How some scientists failed...".

  Water samples taken from within the plume were
  crystal clear.

Is that the effect of Corexit?

The plume was located more than a kilometer below the surface. I don't think Corexit sprayed on the surface would reach that far down the water column. "Crystal clear" is more likely to be a result of high dilution. Just like groundwater is not a river of water under the ground (it's actually rock with a bit of water filling the cracks), an oil plume is not a river of oil in the sea.

Remember that in the case of the gulf oil spil, Corexit was used in a way that it wasn't ever specifically engineered for (based on their own datasheets for 9500). Instead, it was directly inserted into the stream just a meter or so above the wellhead, underwater. There are videos of this from the ROV streams, and corroborated by other sources (eg NYT: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/impact-of-gulf-spi... Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill#Use... )

The result was formation of these subsurface plumes that the author talks about.

It is most likely an "effect" of the concentration not being high enough to be visible to the human eye, because if I'm reading the article correctly they're referring to a natural crude oil plume.

It turns out there's a lot more going on in the Gulf than the few tiny, tiny little holes poked in it by us.

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