How bad could BP oil spill get for the Gulf and the nation?
So how bad could it get?
The numbers point to an unprecedented ecological disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico and possibly along the Eastern Seaboard.
A cap placed over the leaking BP well in the Gulf of Mexico last Thursday began to capture about half the estimated 25,000 barrels a day flowing into the Gulf by June 6. But that still leaves 10,000 barrels, or 420,000 gallons, flowing into the open water each day.
That amount may be reduced as engineers work to siphon off more oil via the cap. But relief wells that could ease the flow from the leaking line won't be finished for at least two months, meaning that roughly another 25 million gallons could be added to the 24 million to 38 million gallons already fouling water and beaches across thousands of miles of the coast in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
And relief wells won't be a sure thing: They are drilled through 2 miles of rock and sediment to find and tap into the Deepwater Horizon well bore, an oil pipeline measuring about 10 inches across. In the massive Ixtoc 1 spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 1979, it took several tries before the relief drill actually intercepted the original hole.
Today, drilling is more a science, but digging a relief well is still like finding needle in a haystack, even though "you have quite a good idea of where the needle is," says Arne Jernelöv, a U.N. expert on environmental catastrophe.
Now, 50 days after the BP rig in the gulf exploded, the range of scenarios for the toll of the environmental disaster are coming into focus:
The best case
Much of the oil that has floated to the surface now is caught in the Gulf of Mexico's Loop Current, which is pinched off into two large eddies, says Jeffrey Short, a former chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who is Pacific science director for the conservation group Oceana.
Because those loops are pinched off from the current, they just keep going around in a circle, not moving down the Florida Panhandle and around to the East Coast.
Oil that flows into the Loop Current eddies "is just going to float around in a big circle and not hit land," Short says. "That's a good thing. It will sit in the sun and be hit with wave action," which means the oil collects more water, increasing its viscosity and allowing it to congeal into larger masses, first as "real soft oil mousse and eventually as tar balls."
"The longer it spins around in the hot sun of the Gulf of Mexico, the closer it's going to get to tar balls," Short says.
The formation of tar balls may not sound like a best-case anything, but it would be.
"While they might be a hazard to things that eat them, they're pretty low impact" ecologically, Short says. They're relatively inert and not nearly as toxic as liquid crude, whose highly toxic volatile components will have evaporated.
"They're not biodegradable. They don't dissolve in water," Jernelöv says. "They're actually like asphalt." After the Ixtoc 1 spill, researchers found that by 1984, "the asphalt-like rocks had crabs crawling over them and oysters settling on them."
There is evidence that oil spill sites can recover, given time.
A study by Canadian researchers found that 24 years after the 1974 Metula oil spill in the Strait of Magellan in Chile, there was high degradation of oil hydrocarbons, leaving only asphalt-like pieces of weathered oil on the beaches and in the marshes. The spill does not appear to have had a significant effect on the coastal ecosystems, but it's difficult to say for sure because they were not studied significantly before the spill.
The fact that the Gulf oil spill is in a warm-water region is helpful because sun and higher temperatures help degrade the oil faster, Jernelöv says.
But one of the great unknowns of this spill is the amount of oil that's staying underwater and what it's doing there.
BP CEO Tony Hayward has tried to play down the underwater effect of the spill by saying that "oil floats." But it doesn't always.
In fact, NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco said Tuesday that water tests have confirmed what scientist have reported — the existence of underwater oil plumes from the BP oil spill, though the concentrations are "very low."
Oil rising through extremely cold water, at high pressure, mixed with methane and at times with chemical dispersant, creates a "cloud" of millions of tiny oil droplets in the water, Jernelöv says.
For the subsurface plumes, the best-case scenario is that the oil droplets are eaten rapidly by oil-eating microbes without depressing the amount of oxygen in the water. How quickly this biological degradation takes place depends on the amount of oil, nutrients and microbes present.
"It gets chewed up pretty fast," Short says.
The worst case
The worst-case scenario is almost here for Florida beachgoers: The oil is fouling the Panhandle, the longest stretch of white-sand beach in the world, says Stephen Leatherman of Florida International University in University Park, Fla.
Known as "Dr. Beach" because of his expertise on America's beaches, Leatherman adds that if the oil gets caught up in the Gulf Stream and heads around the southern tip of Florida, the beaches of the East Coast — which have never had to endure such a nightmare scenario — could be next.
Computer models released last week by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) indicated that the oil could foul thousands of miles of the Atlantic Coast as early as this summer.
"Our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida," says NCAR scientist Synte Peacock, who worked on the study.
Peacock says that for those along portions of the Gulf Coast, including Texas, the worst-case scenario would be for the oil to not enter the Loop Current but to remain and foul the water and coasts of the Gulf of Mexico. For East Coasters, having the oil flow into the Loop Current and then the Gulf Stream would be disastrous.
NOAA officials have predicted an intense hurricane season for this year, saying that as many as 23 tropical storms and hurricanes could form in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
The worst-case scenario for oil and the weather would be a large, Katrina-like hurricane tracking north in the Gulf of Mexico, with its eye passing just west of the oil spill, says Stu Ostro, senior meteorologist at the Weather Channel.
This would bring the "right-front quadrant" of the hurricane directly over the oil. (The right front is the most destructive part of a hurricane, because the wind blows in the same direction as the storm's forward motion.)
"That's the worst-case scenario," Ostro says, "with the wind pushing it all on shore."
Once it got there, the real nightmare would begin: Oil swamping the coastal grass marshes that are nurseries for a large percentage of coastal marine life and mammals. There it would remain a sticky mousse and a contact hazard to anything that gets near it. It would damage water fowl, turtle and marine mammals and possibly the embryos and larvae of invertebrates and fish.
"A deformed fish larvae is a dead fish larvae," says Chris Mann, who directs the Campaign for Healthy Oceans of the Pew Environment Group.
For wildlife, the worst-case scenario already has begun, says Doug Inkley, senior scientist with the National Wildlife Federation.
"This is breeding season in the Gulf," Inkley says. "The oil spill couldn't be at a worse time."
The Gulf's vulnerable young birds, fish and turtles are coming into a polluted environment. "There will be direct effects on these species," he adds.
For sea turtles, for example, the spill is a threat to their existence in the Gulf. There were 225 strandings of sea turtles in the Gulf in May, up from the typical May average of 35. Of those 225, the vast majority were dead, he reports.
"Humpty Dumpty has already fallen," Inkley says. "I believe there will be impacts in the Gulf for decades to come."
Felicia Coleman, who directs the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory in St. Teresa, notes that the "big bend" of Florida from Panama City to Tampa is one of the largest stands of sea grass in the United States. Those grasses contain probably the largest hatcheries and nursery ground for fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico, Coleman says.
"One of the last pristine, most biologically diverse coastal habitats in the country is about to get wiped out. And there's not much we can do about it," she says.
Once they're grown, fish and marine mammals, unlike plankton, have a highly developed sense of smell and the ability to swim away from oil in the water.
But they'll be fighting against their desire to go to long-established feeding and breeding grounds.
"To the animals that live there, the ocean is full of specific habitations," says Pew's Mann. Even dolphins and whales, which can swim long distances, could be affected. "They may not wash up dead on the beach, but they may fare very poorly when displaced from their habitats," he says.
The true extent of the deep-ocean oil plumes created by the spill is unknown. But they could be miles wide and dozens of feet deep. They would tend to stay in long, thin pancake spaces because they would be sandwiched between layers of water at different densities.
Far from being a homogenous column of water, the ocean exists in hundreds of different layers, at different temperatures, pressures and salinities. Each oil "cloud" could end up hanging between two layers of similar buoyancy, Short says.
In those depths, each of these clouds could become kill zones. The oil droplets, for example, could act like flypaper, trapping and killing plankton and other marine life, Jernelöv says.
"They've just got to be getting nuked by this," says Pew's Mann.
This "flypaper" layer can also attract fish, which come looking for the small crustaceans that are stuck in it. "The fish will eat them, and then they're breathing water, they get oil droplets stuck on their gill membranes, and if there's enough it can kill them," Jernelöv says.
Next, the creatures that feed on those plankton would be attracted to the mass of food all in one place, as well as some that could be attracted to the oil itself, which to some microbes is just another source of carbon, or food. But all those microbes in one place would deplete the oxygen in the area, creating an anoxic (no oxygen) space that would kill everything passing through.
This scenario is "very improbable, but that's the worst," Short says. "Nonetheless, the possibility of it demands that we at least find out how many of these plumes there are, how big and dense they are, and then keep an eye on them."
Long-term is really long
The full effects of the spill will hit long after the cleanup efforts are finished, the beaches no longer smell of petroleum and the hazy sheen of oil is gone from the water, experts say.
Fishermen are feeling it now with the fishing ground closures, but that won't be the worst of it, says Florida State's Coleman.
If you wipe out all the fish larvae in one year, "you're not going to know anything about that for three or four years before they're supposed to show up in fishermen's nets."
In the end, there's no way to know how bad this spill will be until about 10 years after the oil is shut off, and even that might be too soon, says Judy McDowell, biology department chair at the Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution. One of the best-documented spills of all time was a tiny 185,000-gallon spill off Massachusetts in 1969. Forty years later, "you can still find traces of hydrocarbons in the sediments," she says.
Oil, and the damage it can do, persists for a long time, she says: "It's still too early to make any kind of prediction as to how it will be."
How bad could BP oil spill get for the Gulf and the nation? - USATODAY.com
. But I'll wholeheartedly agree with the nomination for Mr. Hayward.
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. So yeah, let BP turn a few shades of red. I really don't care.
What a depressing article. I'll certainly be hoping for the "best case" scenario to play out-it's not perfect by any means, but what else can we hope for? I really don't want to see the effects of the worst case scenarios. I'll also definitely be hoping for the hurricane season predictions to be wrong and for the season to be very quiet. 
