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Comment by unclebunkers | Hacker News Reader

We quickly realized that bacteria have evolved to eat oil, so it wasn't quite as big of an environmental disaster as first expected. I would not expect radiation to improve the situation at all.

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>>so it wasn't quite as big of an environmental disaster as first expected

True, it didn't wipe out ALL life in the gulf. Hurray!

Plus wouldn't there be some concern about the ocean floor collapsing due to the blast?

Collapsing into what?

Magma? Hades?

More turtles.

Around the time of the Deepwater Horizon accident, I recall that there was some speculation about the ocean floor being fragile and breaking, causing a vast release of oil and methane.

So the answer to "into what" would be to collapse into the oil-filled voids within the floor.

It's just something I heard on the news when this was news. Maybe it was complete nonsense. Sorry if I offended anyone with my comment!

There aren't any oil-filled voids within the ocean floor. Oil and gas is contained in pourous rock, but the oil-containing rock is mostly solid. In the Deepwater Horizon case, it was also more than five kilometers below the ocean floor, so in other words very far underground.

I have heard the same speculations you refer to in the news, but I think they instead refered to the topmost portion of the well being destroyed, creating cracks in the top of the shaft of the well and allowing oil to leak in all directions. I am not a geologist, so I don't know how plausible these worries were.

i suggest you investigate the side effects of corexit that have emerged since the incident

Corexit is a dispersant, not a bacteria that eats oil.

The comment you're replying to is arguing that corexit is harmful.

Obviously, but what does that comment have to do with anything? So corexit is harmful. My gp was talking about nuclear explosions and bacteria, not corexit.

The grandparent also said, "so it wasn't quite as big of an environmental disaster as first expected." The comment about corexit would appear to refer to that part.

You could argue that it was or wasn't as big of a disaster as expected, but the corexit comment was certainly relevant regardless.

It wasn't relevant.

Damage from corexit would have be factored into initial concerns.

I note that the FDA didn't find a problem with food safety (http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/RecallsOutbreaksEmergencie...) the Wikipedia page references an unreliable Vice/MotherJones article. Not finding much on its side effects from research though. Do you have some additional pointers?

these guys http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=24108904 suggest that it doesn't help the bacteria work, but doesn't suggest any enhanced toxicity.

Here's the wikipedia page for anyone curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corexit#Toxicity

There are plenty of links to reliable sources there. Which page were you looking at?

I was mostly using Google Scholar to look for peer reviewed work with the keywords 'corexit toxicity' There are a about a dozen papers on the first page, of the ones I could read without jumping various firewalls the conclusions tended toward 'less toxic' than 'more toxic'. Would love to see a meta analysis too but didn't dig one up.

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