Satellight image from Deepwater Horizon disaster May 2010. It doesn’t show the oil UNDERWATER. from Wikileaks Commons.

Per a news article in Live Science from February 2nd (yesterday), there’s this news about the poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico as an ongoing legacy of the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

Up to 10 million gallons (38 million liters) of crude oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill has settled at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where it is threatening wildlife and marine ecosystems, according to a new study.

The article is based on a recently released study conducted by FSU’s Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science and published in a peer reviewed journal. There has been very little follow-up about the Deepwater Disaster over the past 4+ years, even after oil slicks began appearing over the site in 2012. I wrote about this two years ago, (in fact, I wrote about it twice) so I’m not surprised. If anyone else is surprised by the truth, then they need to stop being coincidence theorists. This information was around in June of 2010, when BP was uselessly flailing about and trying to ‘fix’ the damage from their Deepwater Horizon accident and the Obama administration was not perp-walking their prevaricating CEO Tony Hayward. The late Matt Simmons went on Bloomberg News to tell us what we know now to be true. Simmons, an expert on oilfield technology, had a mysterious ‘hot tub accident’ and died in August of 2010; the Obama Administration accepted BP’s word that the well-head leak was ‘dead’ a few weeks later in September. And then in 2012, the Coast Guard began seeing oil sheen around the location of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which had no other wells that could leak. (update 2/4/2015: it was Matt Simmons’ frequent assertion that the blowout at the Deepwater site was from a buildup of under-surface methane, which is why the drilling rig had such a spectacular fire. And in Simmons’ view, the explosion had shattered the ocean floor over the oilfield–the oil wasn’t just leaking from the wellhead, it was seeping from cracks all over the ocean floor. Under such circumstances, the only fix Simmons could think of was detonating a nuclear device over the field in order to fuse the ocean floor together). 

Not much else to add, really. If the report in Live Science is correct, the environment of the Gulf of Mexico is going to be moribund for generations. And there’s always a likelihood that a major hurricane (another Katrina event) could pull up thousands of gallons of toxic oil and fling it all over the landscape. 

I guess I should close with a Dr. Guy McPherson story. He was trying to explain near-term human extinction to a fellow airline passenger. The woman in question told him that she believed in God and God is returning and therefore she rejected the possibility that anything but God’s will could change the climate. Guy’s answer was: If God is coming back, do you think he’s gonna be happy with what we’ve done to the place?