Where are Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck when you need them?

[elfs]

In case anyone's interested in watching British Petroleum try to prevent the ongoing extinction event in the Gulf, the live feed can be found at:

http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:46245.asx?bkup=46260

Although I had better luck by dumping that file (it's a reflector file) using wget and hand-commanding mplayer:

mplayer mms://<get this address from the URL above>.akamaistream.net/D/261/97892/v0001/reflector:46260

Comments

Sheesh

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

How is it, Elf, that half of your political posts on this blog condemn talk-radio pundits for their crazy-stupid comments, and half of them are crazy-stupid comments of your own?

Do you not even know that the volume of this spill is on the same order as the natural annual seepage of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico? Yes, the flow rate from the broken wellhead is much higher, but that will stop eventually. The natural flow has been going on since Pangaea broke up, and somehow the Gulf ecosystem has been able to deal with it. Calling this spill an "extinction event" is pure talk-radio BS.

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Re: Sheesh

[elfs.livejournal.com]

[citation needed]

Re: Sheesh

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=20863

and various other outlets repeating the same news, which is basically a brief summary previewing a paper to be presented at an industry conference. I haven't been able to find the original paper. I doubt the numbers in the paper are very accurate given how they were generated, but they're surely good enough to show that large amounts of oil seep continuously into the Gulf, which means the Gulf ecosystem is already naturally adapted to deal with it.

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Re: Sheesh

[blaisepascal]

According to that article, the natural seeps amount to "two Exxon Valdez spills" per year. Wikipedia gives the size of the Exxon Valdez spill as 250000 barrels, so the natural seep in the Gulf is 500000 barrels/year, or 1370 barrels/day.

The now discredited official estimate of the Deepwater Horizon leak is 5000 barrels/day, and it is now known to be much higher. Even with this very low estimate the Deepwater Horizon is putting out 3.65 times the oil the seeps are.

The concentration of oil is much greater in the Deepwater Horizon accident as well. The 1370 barrels a day from the natural seeps are spread out over 600 different areas, so the average seepage from any one area is less than 3 barrels/day, and I highly suspect that each area of seepage is bigger than an 18" pipe.

In short, with probably an order of magnitude higher flow rate concentrated in a single location, the capacity for natural forces will be overwhelmed. Yes, over time all the oil will be broken down and digested naturally, but it will take time, and damage to the ecology from the much larger than normal amount of oil will happen in the meantime.

I'm not impressed that the Gulf ecosystem has, over the past 250 million years (since Pangea) has managed to deal with vastly more oil that will be released by this incident. I drink about a gallon of water a day, so over my lifetime I have drunk well over 30 tons of water. Ask me to drink 10 gallons as fast as possible -- in addition to my normal gallon/day -- and I'll have that extra water around for a few weeks.

Re: Sheesh

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Sure, sure, but that argument falls far short of making this an "extinction event," and anyway, I made the key point myself. The flow rate from this spill IS much higher than the natural seepage rate. But mostly it's just more conspicuous, and because it was caused by human errors and (possibly) negligence, we think about it differently-- and, I argue, less rationally.

Which is what led me to my original comment. It's just bizarre seeing Elf-- a nice, rational guy-- using exactly the same kind of illogical rhetoric he hates to listen to.

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Re: Sheesh

[patcat.livejournal.com]

Elf's a SFnal writer; one of the tenets of writing such fiction is to ask oneself, "What if this continues?"
What if, for instance, the oil got into the Gulf Stream? Fisheries on both sides of the Atlantic would be affected, for one. Also consider that the ocean's phytoplankton counts for about 50% percent of the world's CO2 consumption, and nearly as much of its oxygen production. What would the destruction of even a small percentage of the plankton cause over the short term and long term?
Elf may seem alarmist when he calls it an 'extinction-level event', but it is a real possibility. BP's knocked the glass off the table; only time will tell whether it'll bounce or shatter.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]