Scientists find oil plume below Gulf's surface
By Gregory Mone, Contributor
(May 14) — Since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill began three weeks ago, most eyes and cameras have been focused on the widening, orange slick. But now, as experts argue that the flow rate could far exceed the government’s estimate of 210,000 gallons a day, a team of independent scientists studying the water in and around the disaster zone have found another problem: stores of leaked oil lingering beneath the surface in long, stringy filaments and snowflake-like collections. “It doesn’t float right up on top as you would think,” Raymond Highsmith of the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology tells AOL News. “Some of it floats right under the surface, and some of it now looks like it’s quite a ways down.” Highsmith and his team, formed by a joint venture between the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi, had been planning a seafloor mapping expedition when news of the spill began to get worse and worse. Their focused turned immediately to what might be happening to the oil as it rushed out. Given the depth of the source, they figured the leaked hydrocarbons wouldn’t take a direct path to the surface. “What we wanted to try to find out more about was the fate of the oil,” Highsmith says. … The analysis of all the data they’ve collected thus far — numerous samples have already been dispatched to labs — will take time, but the group has already noted a few worrisome developments. Highsmith says the presence of all that oil could lead to bacterial blooms. These bacteria can eat up the oil, which is good for the clean-up, but they also produce a byproduct, hydrogen sulfide, that draws oxygen out of the water. Oxygen depletion would, in turn, endanger animals in the area. Sure enough, the group has already found that some of the oil-soaked spots beneath the surface registered lower levels of oxygen. The team’s larger suspicion about excess oil lingering in the deep has also been confirmed. The surface slick is not telling the whole story. “We’ve gotten some signals that sometimes the oil is near the surface, sometimes it’s 40 meters down, and sometimes we don’t see it at all,” Highsmith says. “The oil is not evenly distributed, either horizontally or vertically. It’s very patchy.” …
Not Just the Slick: Oil Plume Found Below Gulf’s Surface
By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY
NEW ORLEANS — The underwater plume of oil billowing from a renegade wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico is headed away from the coast and back out to sea, according to federally-funded scientists studying the spill. In the first on-site measurements of the oil spreading below the surface, researchers found the plume of crude stretches 15 to 20 miles southwest from the site of the damaged wellhead and is about 5 miles wide, said Vernon Asper, a University of Southern Mississippi marine scientist leading the research. The plume is compact, much thicker than the lighter remnants reaching the surface and suspended in about 3,000 feet of ocean, he said. A deepwater current is dragging it out to sea. The underwater oil cloud is not connected to the surface slick — now the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. “This [underwater] plume is some of the heavier products of the oil that won’t reach the surface,” Asper said in a radio-telephone interview from aboard the R/V Pelican, a 116-foot research ship at the site of the spill. “We think this oil is going to stay down there. It doesn’t look like it’s coming to the surface.” …
