NPR's science reporter Richard Harris offered a scary update on the activities at the well last night. Here's part of the conversation he had with NPR anchor, Melissa Block.
HARRIS: ...BP has actually assembled a huge team of people in Houston, including experts from rival oil companies. There are federal scientists, folks from the national laboratories, other folks from the oil services industry. And they've been trying to think this through as carefully as they can.
But they really don't have a complete set of information, so there are some tricky things. And I think the nightmare scenario is if they put too much pressure down the hole, they could actually blow out the well down lower. They could actually shear through some of the metal bits now holding the well together below the surface.
And if that happens, then the oil will no longer be coming up to the blowout preventer, it will be coming up through the ground. And basically, at that point, if that were to happen, all they could really do is wait for that relief well to be drilled, which won't be till August. So they don't want to go there.
BLOCK: Richard, I mentioned that BP says it could be a day or more before they know whether this works, right?
HARRIS: That's right. And I think that - it's because they're trying not to do things too fast here. They want to make sure they're avoiding that catastrophe. And I start to think of it as sort of an arm wrestling match. You've got - on the one hand, you've got the force of the oil and gas coming up from below, and they're sort of wrestling against that with a heavy fluid from above. And they want to ease that arm onto the table. They don't want to slam it down and create any really upsetting problems.
BLOCK: BP, at first, said that it was going to shut off the live video feed of the geyser during the top kill, and then it relented when Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts complained. As I'm looking, as we speak, at this live cam from the ocean floor and I'm seeing what look like three jets of oil and gas that now looks very muddy, is that right?
HARRIS: That's right. Those jets actually are the very top of the blowout preventer. It's the riser pipe. That huge 21-inch pipe would kink over at that point. A couple of days ago, that was only one jet. And so, what we're seeing is actually this pipe is getting worse and worse with time.
And what you're seeing come out of there is some of the drilling fluid that's squirting out, and you can see it in the background settling onto the ocean floor around it.
Obviously, when you're pumping in fluid into a situation like this, some will go up into the holes that are there, and some will go down. And the hope is that more will go down than go up over time. So - but that's a very vivid and must be a pretty scary picture to the engineers who are watching the situation, because I know that the drilling mud is likely to make those holes worse and worse over time.
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We're well past a month into the oil spill. The response of the scientific community has seemed slow.
It's not the scientists' fault. Blame for this probably lies with the overall absence of a disaster plan, a plan developed long before the spill and dating back to the permitting of deep water wells. That curious (not to say criminal) absence of oversight is just another piece of the oversight problem dating back -- oh, probably as long as we've depended so heavily on oil.
After a slow start, American science is finally beginning to tackle the oil disaster in earnest. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency charged with monitoring the health of the oceans, is sending multiple boats into the gulf. The National Science Foundation, another arm of the government, is issuing rapid grants to finance academic teams, including the one aboard the Walton Smith. BP, the oil company responsible for the spill, has pledged $500 million for research. And scientists like those aboard the Walton Smith are getting emergency financing from the government for their studies.
There is progress to report. though it presents an even worse overall picture of what's happening within the Gulf waters.
This week, another research vessel confirmed the existence of a huge undersea plume. And on Thursday, a team of scientists appointed by the Obama administration offered a more credible estimate of the flow rate at the broken well, putting it at two to four times the previous calculation. That higher estimate only added to the sense among academic scientists that much of the oil must be hovering in the deep sea, instead of surfacing.
And yes, there are oil plumes and they are now threatening "some of the finest fishing territory in the gulf" -- Mobile Bay. Those oil plumes are notably diffuse but still deadly to life in the Gulf. It's no longer common wisdom that oil spills rise to the surface.
Even in that diffuse form, the plumes were having a drastic impact on the chemistry of the ocean, with dissolved oxygen levels plunging as each plume drifted through the sea.
That, [a researcher on the Walton Smith] said, was most likely because bacteria were ramping up to consume the oil and gas — a good thing, over all, but it was creating a heavy demand for oxygen and other nutrients. Aside from the toxic effect of the oil, the declining oxygen was a potential threat to sea life. ...NYT
