The Oil and the Loop Current
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF
Institute for Optical Oceanography, College of Marine Science, University of South Florida The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as observed from space on Monday.
An article on Tuesday in The Times examines the prospect that oil from the gulf spill could reach the so-called loop current, which could carry it into the Florida Keys and the Atlantic Ocean.
Satellite images shed light on the trajectory of the oil and the current. The image above shows the oil spill as observed from space by the NASA satellites Terra and Aqua on Monday. Using an array of sensors, these satellites detect the spectral reflection of the ocean, allowing a wide variety of observations on things like water temperature and surface features like the oil spill.
The spill is pictured in outline, revealing a long tail of oil being dragged away from the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig by ocean currents. Responsible for the current is a giant eddy, also known as a cyclone, about 150 miles wide from east to west. It has spun off the much larger loop current, a powerful and unpredictable ocean feature that transports warm water in a clockwise motion from the Yucatán Peninsula into the northern Gulf of Mexico, then south to the Florida Keys and out into the Atlantic.
The thickness of the oil in the tail is unknown. Federal officials have characterized it as a light sheen, while some independent scientists say they believe it is considerably thicker. That the tail of oil is easily visible from space is one indication that it may be thicker than a light sheen.
“It’s highly visible in our imagery,” said Nan Walker, an oceanographer with the Earth Scan Laboratory at Louisiana State University, where a separate analysis of the satellite images is being done. “It’s unmistakable. And oil spills, to my mind, aren’t usually that easy to track.”
The next two images show the ocean temperature in the gulf, with an outline of the oil spill overlaid. The dark red bulb directly below the spill is the loop current; above it is the cooler and less distinct cyclone.
The first image shows the spill, upper left, in relation to the loop current on May 6-7.
Institute for Optical Oceanography, College of Marine Science, University of South FloridaThe following image shows the spill on Monday, with a long tongue of oil snaking out to sea.
(All three images were created by Chuanmin Hu of the Institute for Optical Oceanography at the University of South Florida.)
Institute for Optical Oceanography, College of Marine Science, University of South FloridaIan Somerhalder Says The Gulf Oil Spill Is ‘Beyond Tragic’
Posted by taylor blue on May 14, 2010
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I must admit that I was all ready to write this fluff funny piece on Ian Somerhalder today. He is one of my favorite actors and everything. I am sure everyone knows that already. I’m just reinforcing the fact. But then I was reading through some stories and I found this one on how Ian speaks out about the Gulf Oil Spill. I know when it happened he wrote about it a lot on Twitter. And now the Los Angeles Times interviewed him about it too. Ian speaks from the heart and it just pulls at me so bad.
Ian had plans to spend his hiatus in Louisiana but that changed when their was an explosion of a drilling rig just off the coast of Louisiana. Weeks later, the tragedy hadn’t lessened as barrels and barrels of oil leaked into the water that Ian grew up swimming in.
“I never wanted to be one of those actors with a political agenda but this has become Obama’s Katrina in the way he’s dealt with it. It’s a massive disaster, on a scale we haven’t even begun to fathom, and it could have been stopped by a valve that cost half a million dollars.”
He is quick to say how he’s not usually a negative person but this has effected him in many ways.
“I’m not a negative person. I’m just scared right now. No one really knows what’s happening. From what we see on the surface, NOAA and the oceanographers can estimate what’s coming out of the rig. But BP has denied scientists access to the footage of the gushing leak below the surface, so there’s no way for us to know the actual realistic scale of the damage that’s still happening. NOAA is a government administration! Why isn’t Obama stepping in and demanding that footage, demanding a live view of what’s going on?”
Ian has just shot a bunch of PSA’s for the cause to show people the extent of the damage.
“I feel like I could cry right now. It’s not just because it’s my home. Just watching all these very proud, hardworking fishermen, who have never asked for anything in their lives, who support themselves and their families for generations with this one industry. Now it’s likely to disappear. If it’ll ever recover, we’re talking decades and decades. It’s beyond tragic.”
I love seeing passion in actors. And I know that Ian is human like everyone else but in a way it loves me so much more.
The Obama administration is actively trying to dismiss media reports that vast plumes of oil lurk beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, unmeasured and uncharted.
But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose job it is to assess and track the damage being caused by the BP oil spill that began four weeks ago, is only monitoring what's visible -- the slick on the Gulf's surface -- and currently does not have a single research vessel taking measurements below.
The one ship associated with NOAA that had been doing such research is back in Pascagoula, Miss., having completed a week-long cruise during which scientists taking underwater samples found signs of just the kind of plume that environmentalists fear could have devastating effects on sea life of all shapes and sizes.
Meanwhile, the commander of the NOAA vessel that the White House on Friday claimed in a press release "is now providing information for oil spill related research" told HuffPost on Tuesday that he's actually far away, doing something else entirely.
"We are in the Western Gulf doing plankton research," said Commander Dave Score, reached by satellite phone on his research vessel, the Gordon Gunter. "So I really don't know. I'm just on orders."
Indeed, you can track the Gordon Gunter right here.
Two other NOAA research vessels are also in the area, but not monitoring the spill: The Thomas Jefferson, which has spent the last five days in Galveston, Texas; and the Oregon II, which has been under repair in Pascagoula for almost six months.
NOAA director Jane Lubchenco on Monday decried media reports about plumes of underwater oil as "misleading, premature and, in some cases, inaccurate." (See the Huffington Post and New York Times coverage.)
Lubchenco implicitly criticized scientists on the Pelican, a research vessel operated by the NOAA-affiliated National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology (NIUST), for being hasty in its pronouncements to the media.
"No definitive conclusions have been reached by this research team about the composition of the undersea layers they discovered," Lubchenco said in her statement. "Characterization of these layers will require analysis of samples and calibration of key instruments. The hypothesis that the layers consist of oil remains to be verified."
NIUST, while partially funded by NOAA, is a cooperative venture with the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi. And it was the Pelican crew's idea -- not NOAA's -- to start taking underwater measurements, although NOAA was perfectly happy to take credit for it, initially.
NOAA officials did not respond to repeated questions from the Huffington Post on Tuesday, and therefore did not explain how they could possibly assess or track underwater oil without having any vessels out taking measurements. Nor did they explain how the Gordon Gunter showed up in an administration press release.
Doug Helton, the emergency response coordinator in Seattle who is NOAA's trajectory expert, answered his phone but wouldn't say much. "It's still a pretty dynamic situation as to what's in the field today, as opposed to yesterday," he hedged, before saying he would call back after getting clearance from NOAA's public affairs office. There was no call back.
"The fact that NOAA has missed the ball catastrophically on the tracking and effects monitoring of this spill is inexcusable," said Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska marine conservationist who recently spent more than a week on the Gulf Coast advising Greenpeace. "They need 20 research ships on this, yesterday."
Steiner explained: "This is probably turning out to be the largest oil spill in U.S. history and the most unique oil spill in world history," on account of it occurring not on or near the surface, but nearly a mile below.
"They should have had a preexisting rapid response plan," he told HuffPost. "They should have had vessels of opportunity -- shrimp vessels, any vessel that can deploy a water-column sampling device -- pre-contracted, on a list, to be called up in an event that this happened. And they blew it. And it's been going on for a month now, and all that information has been lost."
Steiner gave credit to the scientists on the Pelican, but noted that at most they had sampled less than 1 percent of the affected waters. "The Pelican happened to drop some of their sampling devices into a plume and found it, but there have to be plumes elsewhere, and the biological implication are vast."
NOAA officials "haven't picked it up because they haven't looked in the right places," he said. "There have to be dozens of these massive plumes of toxic Deepwater Horizon oil, and they haven't set out to delineate them in any shape or form."
Frank Muller-Karger, an oceanography professor at the University of South Florida who will be testifying before the House Energy Committee on Wednesday, said that testing for oil beneath the surface should be a top priority.
"I think that should be one of our biggest concerns, getting the technology and the research to try to understand how big this amorphous mass of water is, and how it moves," he said.
"It's like an iceberg. Most of it is below the surface. And we just have no instruments below the surface that can help us monitor the size, the concentration and the movement."
Muller-Karger said there are all sorts of implements that researchers should be deploying, including optical sensors and current meters. "I think that now people are really scrambling to get some vessels out there," said Muller-Karger. "I think we're going to need a fleet of research vessels."
In addition to measuring the amount of oil, researchers need to study the effect on fish larvae and bacteria, he said. "Very big fish and very prized fish are moving in to spawn -- it's a critical time of the year," he told HuffPost. "Larvae from the fish may end up eating droplets of oil.
On Tuesday, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla,) released four new videos showing oil billowing out of the Deepwater Horizon blowout site.
Steiner said NOAA is not only failing to fully measure the impact of the spill, but, he said, "if they rationally want to close and open fisheries, then they need to know where this stuff is going."
As it happens, NOAA announced Tuesday that it is doubling its Gulf fishing ban to encompass 19 percent of the federal waters.
But Steiner said it is quite possible, for instance, that some plumes are being carried by a slow deepwater southwest, toward the coast of Texas. More oil than is already visible could be entering the Loop Current, which could carry it past the Florida Keys and up the Atlantic coast.
"And truly, they really need 20 or 30 vessels out there yesterday," Steiner said. "And I think they know that. And so all the spin -- that they have this under control, that there's no oil under the surface to worry about -- they're wrong, and they know it."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/18/gulf-oil-spill-government_n_580815.html?ref=twitter
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