I’ve been avoiding news about the oil rig failure and subsequent oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico for the last few days. The fact that the headlines have been so frequent and so dire has been enough to put me off. Sometimes I just can’t cope. But I did finally give in and start reading about it. It’s absolutely sickening. The scale is so large that it’s almost incomprehensible, and there’s no picture or graph or table that can adequately describe the impact that this disaster could have.
What upsets me about this kind of thing is the fact they are entirely man-made disasters. No doubt the death toll will be far less than the earthquakes we’ve seen in Haiti, China and Chile recently, but this is something that we’ve inflicted on ourselves. Obviously not deliberately, but it’s something that humankind is responsible for. It’s good the BP have put their hand up to accept this responsibility and to fund the clean up, but the damage that is going to occur one way or another is horrific.
Also, we have to appreciate that this isn’t your normal spill. This isn’t a specific amount of oil being carried that has ended up in the ocean. this is oil continuously flowing out of the ground into the ocean at a high rate. It’s still flowing.
The Big Picture at the Boston Globe usually captures events like this really well, but I have to say that this time even they seem to be struggling. Check out their photos here.
Perhaps it’s indicative of the way I think, but this graphical representation of some of the facts and figures helped me to start geting my head around the scope of this thing. Maybe it will help you too.
May 5, 2010 at 9:26 am
G’day Sam,
Two more numbers to consider: 10 (degrees C sea temperature in Prince William Sound, Alaska, site of the Exxon Valdez spill) and 23 (degrees C sea temperature in the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon). This is important. It’s the reason why I was never that concerned about the very similar Montara well breach off the Kimberley coast last year. Some people at the time were calling that the biggest environmental disaster in Australian history, but it’s proven to have negligible environmental impact. The caveat here is that the Montara oil had a relatively high proportion of light fractions (so easy meat for microbes and evaporation). I don’t know what the composition of the Deepwater Sound oil is.
Check http://www.alaskadispatch.com/projects/gulf-spill/5189-comparing-gulf-spill-to-exxon-valdez-might-not-be-sound before getting too worried.
Nifty pictures that do make a pretty reasonable fist of capturing the scale are worth having a look at here: http://www.esl.lsu.edu/home/
May 5, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Thanks Mark!