“Christopher Reddy, a co-author of the study released Thursday by the journal Science, says it was a big surprise when scientists first reported that large amounts of oil and oil compounds were staying underwater rather than rising to the surface.”
The findings reported in Science matches other reports of “vaseline-like” blobs (see previous post).
The University of South Florida’s College of Marine Sciences keeps reporting running into opposition from unexpected parties in its attempts to investigate the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
It had previously mentioned encountering difficulties in obtaining samples. (See USF scientists: BP not helpful in researching oil layers in the Tampa Tribune on June 8, and USF professor: BP’s resistance is ‘unsettling’, WRBL on June 9.)
An article published in the St. Petersburg Times on Tuesday, August 10 states that NOAA and the Coast Guard told the department to shut up about its research findings. Apparently, it’s not the only local university with that kind of experience either, as an oceanographer at the University of Southern Mississippi received the same treatment.
The article is available online at: http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/usf-says-government-tried-to-squelch-their-oil-plume-findings/1114225.
Yet today, the same paper reports that the dean of USF’s College of Marine Sciences now classifies it as “old news” in a letter to the editor.
USF’s College of Marine Sciences is based in St. Petersburg whereas the main campus is in Tampa. Today, August 12, is also when the decisions about new oil spills research projects are made, at the same location. Ten million dollars provided by BP will finance the selected projects.
On May 17, I blogged on the oxygen depletion (30%) apparently seen near some of the gushers at the time and on what Samantha Joye, marine science professor at the University of Georgia, had to say about that.
On August 1, Samantha Joye wrote on her blog:
She added:
In other media, scientists voice similar views. Pamela Hallock Muller, also of USF’s College of Marine Science, comments:
Anna Armitage, a professor at Texas A&M University, says:
“Consumers Not Buying Seafood’s Clean Bill Of Health” said a tweet that caught my eye this morning.
The issue is important enough to post the link to the item on NPR here:
“Certain areas of the Gulf of Mexico have been given permission to resume commercial fishing. Consumers, however, are still leery about eating seafood from the Gulf since all the oil hasn’t been cleaned up yet.”
The item’s audio will be available at about 9am Eastern Time (Miami, New York, Boston), which is 3pm Central European Time (Amsterdam, Paris, Cologne, Madrid).
Reünie studievereniging GeoVUsie 20 november 2010
I just ran into this bit of research that is dated (2000), but still pretty cool. If you do a lot of lab work, you’ll be interested.
(more…)
“The European Commission is currently funding projects aimed at developing new technologies to mitigate the effects of pollution in our seas and oceans. The Argomarine project (Automatic oil spill recognition and geopositioning integrated in a marine monitoring network) is one example.”
For more, read the full article.
California has a state rock, and some people want to get rid of it, reports this article in the New York Times. Is California losing its coolness or does it have a point?
California’s state rock is serpentinite. Not serpentine. Serpentine – (Mg,Fe)3Si2O5(OH)4 – is the name of the mineral group containing antigorite, chrysotile and lizardite.
Chrysotile is an asbestos mineral and that is the reason someone has decided serpentinite – a rock made up of mainly serpentines – should no longer be California’s state rock.
I like the discussion, for five reasons:
As already mentioned, the asbestos mineral that can occur in serpentinite is chrysotile. Chrysotile is called white asbestos and is the most used type of asbestos. Serpentine crystals are leaf-like; in chrysotile, the sheets are rolled into long fibers.
Other asbestos minerals are part of the amphibole mineral group. Their general formula is A2B2(Si,Al)8O22(OH)2. A is usually Mg, Fe, Ca and Na. B stands for Mg, divalent Fe, Al, and trivalent Fe. Amphiboles are inosilicates, which means that the oxygen-silicon tetrahedrons in it are linked in long chains, leading to elegant needle-like crystals.
The amphiboles include five asbestos minerals. Amosite (green, brown) and crocidolite (blue) are most used (after chrysotile). The remaining asbestos minerals – tremolite, actinolite and anthophyllite - are much less frequently used. Crocidolite is mainly mined in South Africa.
Tiger eye is a mix of quartz and crocidolite (or riebeckite, another amphibole), in which the crocidolite has been (partially) replaced by quartz. Below is an image of tiger eye. The remnants of crocidolite give it its pretty look. The rusty color is indeed the color of iron rust.
Jade can be a gem stone quality serpentinite.
Blue and brown asbestos pose the greatest health hazards – greater than that of the chrysotile occurring in serpentinite – but environmental conditions play an important role as the main risk of asbestos is associated with airborne asbestos dust.
The health hazards of asbestos are very different than those of substances like cyanide, carbon monoxide, osmium tetroxide or nitric acid.
About ten years ago, Dutch scientist Mirna Hensen concluded a prize-winning study assessing the safe limits and the impact of environmental conditions on the hazard of asbestos fibers in soil. In her experiments, notably the presence of even a small percentage of moisture in soil lowered the emission and hence the health risk of asbestos fibers considerably. Wind speed also played a large role.
Does this have anything to do with serpentinite as a natural rock? Yes, if you start sawing it and/or grinding it into dust, just for fun. Does having it as a state rock promote that? Frankly, I don’t know.
I do know this:
I have absolutely no worries about my tiger eye, nor about my serpentinite sample. I have no plans of doing anything with them other than looking at them occasionally, which is harmless. I no longer wear the tiger eye but that is because I simply have grown out of it and rarely wear pendants anyway.
I applaud asbestos disease awareness, and I do understand that this discussion heightens asbestos disease awareness. The focus of such discussions, however, should be on to limiting asbestos health risks in real life. Banning serpentinite as a state rock is a little bit like trying to make the sun illegal because it emits UV.
The above image is a photograph from 1913. It shows the fibrous nature of asbestos-containing rock from Québec under a polarisation microscope (the type of microscope earth scientists use). Magnification: 14 x, crossed nicolls.
PS
A special note to those with asbestos disease and their loved ones: I am not in any way trying to belittle your experiences and insights. I grew up witnessing three different types of cancer wreak havoc in three different people close to me. Lung cancer – one likely dust/tobacco-related – later claimed two other relatives.
I do not smoke and I rarely eat meat, but I have worked with all sorts of harmful substances, even osmium tetroxide, because I know how to handle them safely.
A tweet alerted me to this article in The Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7127904.ece
Its headline is outdated; the flow rate may well be in the area of 60,000 barrels per day, BP told Dutch daily NRC as reported on May 6:
http://www.nrc.nl/economie/article2538809.ece/Olieramp_mogelijk_groter_dan_eerder_aangenomen
US Secretary Salazar had previously stated he expected 100,000 barrels per day to go into the Gulf for about three months, also as reported by Dutch daily NRC, on May 2:
http://www.nrc.nl/buitenland/article2536830.ece/Obama_alles_doen_om_olielek_te_bestrijden
Much more interesting is the oxygen depletion (30%) apparently seen near some of the gushers and what Samantha Joye, marine science professor at the University of Georgia has to say about that. I’ll take her word for it.
The Gulf Stream may become even more important to the Gulf, then, and modelers – physical oceanographers – would surely be scrunching a lot of numbers related to that.
I wish I could say more about it, but I am not an expert on what can happen when you release such huge amounts of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and I don’t have the time to dive into it right now (but am, obviously, interested).
Something similar – a blowout with a large spill into the Gulf of Mexico – happened before, however, in the 1970s and apparently, the ecological impact was minimal at the time.
PS
Orcutt, B.N., S. B. Joye, S. Kleindienst, K. Knittel, A. Ramette, A. Reitz, V. A. Samarkin, T. Truede, and A. Boetius, 2009. Impact of natural oil and higher hydrocarbons on microbial diversity, distribution and activity in Gulf of Mexico cold seep sediments. Deep Sea Research, in press.
Here: http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/site/2931/
Also has phone numbers to call, social media channels etc.
By: NOAA, BP, Transocean, US Department of Homeland Security.
As I am a geologist, used to volunteer with world-renowned oiled-wildlife response expert Lee Fox who is based on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico (who usually funds her own oil spill cleanup work, so I urge you to make a donation) and used to live on that shore too, I have at least three reasons for being interested in how the various parties are dealing with this blowout.
Above: 1993 Tampa Bay oil spill cleanup – Photograph: Dawn Waldt
Some of those parties are the US Coast Guard, BP (British, leasing the platform), Transocean Ltd. (Swiss owner of the platform), and Cameron International Corp. (the Houston company that supplied the blowout preventer that apparently failed).
Read more:
Engineering details (ROVs, valves, capping):
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/04/30/oil-spill-blowout-preventer-valve.html?ref=rss#ixzz0mfkikIZ8
1999 report on how to deal with blowouts at sea:
http://www.mms.gov/tarprojects/311/311AA.pdf
UNEP on oil spills:
http://oils.gpa.unep.org/facts/operational.htm
WWF oil spill response report, but for Arctic conditions (2006): http://www.worldwildlife.org/what/wherewework/arctic/WWFBinaryitem12156.pdf
Infoplease.com – an undertaking by Pearson Education – on oil spills:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001451.html
(The Gulf of Mexico suffered a big spill in the 1970s after the blowout of an exploratory well, but that apparently had little environmental impact. The North Sea also had a blowout in the 1970s.)
Above: cleaned-up brown pelican – 1993 Tampa Bay oil spill cleanup – Photograph: Dawn Waldt
