It's been two years since the Deepwater Horizon disaster unleashed 4.9 million barrels of oil on the Gulf of Mexico. In the midst of the disaster, BP and its contractors did everything they could to keep people from seeing the scale of the disaster. But new photos released Monday offer some new insight to just how grim the Gulf became for sea life.
The images were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that Greenpeace filed back in August 2010, asking for any communication related to endangered and threatened Gulf species. Now, many months later, Greenpeace received a response from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that included more than 100 photos from the spill, including many of critically endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtles dead and covered in oil.
Most photos are missing dates and descriptions, though the FOIA request covered the period of April 20, 2010, to July 30, 2010. But they're pretty shocking—which is probably why they weren't made public at the height of the spill. "It just makes me furious," said John Hocevar, a marine biologist who works for Greenpeace. "I had so many conversations with people in various government agencies working on the Gulf spill, and I feel like they were hiding things from all of us."
"The White House was sitting on this stuff for over two years, at the same time they were saying everything was fine, that the oil was gone, and while they were rushing ahead with plans for new drilling in the Gulf, the Arctic, elsewhere," Hocevar continued. "It's just not okay. This is not an acceptable type of collateral damage."
Mother Jones has requested comment from NOAA but had not received a response at press time.
Jump below the fold to see some of the photos that have been kept under wraps for the past two years:

Kate Sheppard

Reporter

Kate Sheppard is a staff reporter Mother Jones' Washington bureau. For more of her stories, click here. She Tweets here. RSS | Twitter

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/05/greenpeace-bp-photos

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Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/04/201241682318260912.html

Eyeless shrimp and fish with lesions are becoming common, with BP oil pollution believed to be the likely cause.

Dahr Jamail Last Modified: 18 Apr 2012 03:16

New Orleans, LA - "The fishermen have never seen anything like this," Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. "And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I've never seen anything like this either."
Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.
Cowan's findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP's oil and dispersants.
Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP's 2010 oil disaster.
Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp - and interviewees' fingers point towards BP's oil pollution disaster as being the cause.
Eyeless shrimp
Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.
"At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these," Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.
According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP's oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: "Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets."

Eyeless shrimp, from a catch of 400 pounds of eyeless shrimp, said to be caught September 22, 2011, in Barataria Bay, Louisiana [Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera]

"Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico]," she added, "They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don't have their usual spikes … they look like they've been burned off by chemicals."
On April 20, 2010, BP's Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded, and began the release of at least 4.9 million barrels of oil. BP then used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersants to sink the oil.
Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing.
"I've seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out," Ladner told Al Jazeera. "The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday."
While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and "their shells missing around their gills and head".
"We've fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this," he added.
Ladner has also seen crates of blue crabs, all of which were lacking at least one of their claws.
Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs "with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they've been dead for a week".
Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.
"We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills."
Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was "ten per cent what it normally is".
"I've never seen this," he said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherman, and seafood processor we spoke with about the seafood deformities.
Given that the Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, this phenomenon does not bode well for the region, or the country.

BP's chemicals?
"The dispersants used in BP's draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber," Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. "It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known".
The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP's disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.
Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic - able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus - and carcinogenic.
Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP's submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from "a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor".
Marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia published results of her submarine dives around the source area of BP's oil disaster in the Nature Geoscience journal.
Her evidence showed massive swathes of oil covering the seafloor, including photos of oil-covered bottom dwelling sea creatures.
While showing slides at an American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington, Joye said: "This is Macondo oil on the bottom. These are dead organisms because of oil being deposited on their heads."
Dr Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, has conducted tests on seafood and sediment samples along the Gulf for chemicals present in BP's crude oil and toxic dispersants.
"Tests have shown significant levels of oil pollution in oysters and crabs along the Louisiana coastline," Subra told Al Jazeera. "We have also found high levels of hydrocarbons in the soil and vegetation."
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, PAHs "are a group of semi-volatile organic compounds that are present in crude oil that has spent time in the ocean and eventually reaches shore, and can be formed when oil is burned".
"The fish are being exposed to PAHs, and I was able to find several references that list the same symptoms in fish after the Exxon Valdez spill, as well as other lab experiments," explained Cowan. "There was also a paper published by some LSU scientists that PAH exposure has effects on the genome."
The University of South Florida released the results of a survey whose findings corresponded with Cowan's: a two to five per cent infection rate in the same oil impact areas, and not just with red snapper, but with more than 20 species of fish with lesions. In many locations, 20 per cent of the fish had lesions, and later sampling expeditions found areas where, alarmingly, 50 per cent of the fish had them.
"I asked a NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] sampler what percentage of fish they find with sores prior to 2010, and it's one tenth of one percent," Cowan said. "Which is what we found prior to 2010 as well. But nothing like we've seen with these secondary infections and at this high of rate since the spill."
"What we think is that it's attributable to chronic exposure to PAHs released in the process of weathering of oil on the seafloor," Cowan said. "There's no other thing we can use to explain this phenomenon. We've never seen anything like this before."
Official response
Questions raised by Al Jazeera's investigation remain largely unanswered.
Al Jazeera contacted the office of Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, who provided a statement that said the state continues to test its waters for oil and dispersants, and that it is testing for PAHs.
"Gulf seafood has consistently tested lower than the safety thresholds established by the FDA for the levels of oil and dispersant contamination that would pose a risk to human health," the statement reads. "Louisiana seafood continues to go through extensive testing to ensure that seafood is safe for human consumption. More than 3,000 composite samples of seafood, sediment and water have been tested in Louisiana since the start of the spill."

Signs of the impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous - and scientists and fishermen point fingers towards BP's oil as being the cause [Keath Ladner]

At the federal government level, the Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency - both federal agencies which have powers in the this area - insisted Al Jazeera talk with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
NOAA won't comment to the media because its involvement in collecting information for an ongoing lawsuit against BP.
BP refused Al Jazeera's request to comment on this issue for a television interview, but provided a statement that read:
"Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is among the most tested in the world, and, according to the FDA and NOAA, it is as safe now as it was before the accident."
BP claims that fish lesions are common, and that prior to the Deepwater Horizon accident there was documented evidence of lesions in the Gulf of Mexico caused by parasites and other agents.
The oil giant added:
"As part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, which is led by state and federal trustees, we are investigating the extent of injury to natural resources due to the accident.
"BP is funding multiple lines of scientific investigation to evaluate potential damage to fish, and these include: extensive seafood testing programs by the Gulf states; fish population monitoring conducted by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Auburn University and others; habitat and water quality monitoring by NOAA; and toxicity tests on regional species. The state and federal Trustees will complete an injury assessment and the need for environmental restoration will be determined."
Before and after
But evidence of ongoing contamination continues to mount.
Crustacean biologist Darryl Felder, in the Department of Biology with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is in a unique position.
Felder has been monitoring the vicinity of BP's blowout Macondo well both before and after the oil disaster began, because, as he told Al Jazeera, "the National Science Foundation was interested in these areas that are vulnerable due to all the drilling".
"So we have before and after samples to compare to," he added. "We have found seafood with lesions, missing appendages, and other abnormalities."
Felder also has samples of inshore crabs with lesions. "Right here in Grand Isle we see lesions that are eroding down through their shell. We just got these samples last Thursday and are studying them now, because we have no idea what else to link this to as far as a natural event."
According to Felder, there is an even higher incidence of shell disease with crabs in deeper waters.
"My fear is that these prior incidents of lesions might be traceable to microbes, and my questions are, did we alter microbial populations in the vicinity of the well by introducing this massive amount of petroleum and in so doing cause microbes to attack things other than oil?"
One hypothesis he has is that the waxy coatings around crab shells are being impaired by anthropogenic chemicals or microbes resulting from such chemicals.
"You create a site where a lesion can occur, and microbes attack. We see them with big black lesions, around where their appendages fall off, and all that is left is a big black ring."
Felder added that his team is continuing to document the incidents: "And from what we can tell, there is a far higher incidence we're finding after the spill."
"We are also seeing much lower diversity of crustaceans," he said. "We don't have the same number of species as we did before [the spill]."
[Continues below the slideshow]
Felder has tested his samples for oil, but not found many cases where hydrocarbon traces tested positive. Instead, he believes what he is seeing in the deepwater around BP's well is caused from the "huge amount" of drilling mud used during the effort to stop the gushing well.
"I was collecting deepwater shrimp with lesions on the side of their carapace. Under the lesions, the gills were black. The organ that propels the water through the gills, it too was jet-black. That impairs respiratory ability, and has a negative effect on them. It wasn't hydrocarbons, but is largely manganese precipitates, which is really odd. There was a tremendous amount of drilling mud pumped out with Macondo, so this could be a link."
Some drilling mud and oil well cement slurries used on oil extraction rigs contains up to 90 per cent by weight of manganomanganic (manganese) oxide particles.
Felder is also finding "odd staining" of animals that burrow into the mud that cause stain rings, and said: "It is consistently mineral deposits, possibly from microbial populations in [overly] high concentrations."
A direct link
Dr Andrew Whitehead, an associate professor of biology at Louisiana State University, co-authored the report Genomic and physiological footprint of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on resident marsh fishes that was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2011.
Whitehead's work is of critical importance, as it shows a direct link between BP's oil and the negative impacts on the Gulf's food web evidenced by studies on killifish before, during and after the oil disaster.
"What we found is a very clear, genome-wide signal, a very clear signal of exposure to the toxic components of oil that coincided with the timing and the locations of the oil," Whitehead told Al Jazeera during an interview in his lab.
According to Whitehead, the killifish is an important indicator species because they are the most abundant fish in the marshes, and are known to be the most important forage animal in their communities.
"That means that most of the large fish that we like to eat and that these are important fisheries for, actually feed on the killifish," he explained. "So if there were to be a big impact on those animals, then there would probably be a cascading effect throughout the food web. I can't think of a worse animal to knock out of the food chain than the killifish."
But we may well be witnessing the beginnings of this worst-case scenario.
Whitehead is predicting that there could be reproductive impacts on the fish, and since the killifish is a "keystone" species in the food web of the marsh, "Impacts on those species are more than likely going to propagate out and effect other species. What this shows is a very direct link from exposure to DWH oil and a clear biological effect. And a clear biological effect that could translate to population level long-term consequences."
Back on shore, troubled by what he had been seeing, Keath Ladner met with officials from the US Food and Drug Administration and asked them to promise that the government would protect him from litigation if someone was made sick from eating his seafood.
"They wouldn't do it," he said.
"I'm worried about the entire seafood industry of the Gulf being on the way out," he added grimly.
'Tar balls in their crab traps'
Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer, as well as a marine and oyster biologist, has "great concern" about the hundreds of dolphin deaths he has seen in the region since BP's disaster began, which he feels are likely directly related to the BP oil disaster.
"Adult dolphins' systems are picking up whatever is in the system out there, and we know the oil is out there and working its way up the food chain through the food web - and dolphins are at the top of that food chain."
Cake explained: "The chemicals then move into their lipids, fat, and then when they are pregnant, their young rely on this fat, and so it's no wonder dolphins are having developmental issues and still births."
Cake, who lives in Mississippi, added: "It has been more than 33 years since the 1979 Ixtoc-1 oil disaster in Mexico's Bay of Campeche, and the oysters, clams, and mangrove forests have still not recovered in their oiled habitats in seaside estuaries of the Yucatan Peninsula. It has been 23 years since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska, and the herring fishery that failed in the wake of that disaster has still not returned."
Cake believes we are still in the short-term impact stage of BP's oil disaster.
"I will not be alive to see the Gulf of Mexico recover," said Cake, who is 72 years old. "Without funding and serious commitment, these things will not come back to pre-April 2010 levels for decades."
The physical signs of the disaster continue.
"We're continuing to pull up oil in our nets," Rooks said. "Think about losing everything that makes you happy, because that is exactly what happens when someone spills oil and sprays dispersants on it. People who live here know better than to swim in or eat what comes out of our waters."
Khuns and her husband told Al Jazeera that fishermen continue to regularly find tar balls in their crab traps, and hundreds of pounds of tar balls continue to be found on beaches across the region on a daily basis.
Meanwhile Cowan continues his work, and remains concerned about what he is finding.
"We've also seen a decrease in biodiversity in fisheries in certain areas. We believe we are now seeing another outbreak of incidence increasing, and this makes sense, since waters are starting to warm again, so bacterial infections are really starting to take off again. We think this is a problem that will persist for as long as the oil is stored on the seafloor."
Felder wants to continue his studies, but now is up against insufficient funding.
Regarding his funding, Cowan told Al Jazeera: "We are up against social and economic challenges that hamper our ability to get our information out, so the politics have been as daunting as the problem [we are studying] itself. But my funding is not coming from a source that requires me to be quiet."
Follow Dahr Jamail on Twitter: @DahrJamail

Read more about the scientists in this article, and their findings:
Dr Darryl Felder, Department of Biology, University of Louisiana, Lafayette. Runs a research lab that studies the biology of marine crustaceans. Dr Felder has been monitoring the seafloor in the vicinity of BP's blow-out Macondo oil-well both before and after the oil disaster began. He was studying samples from the seafloor in the Macondo area pre-spill via funding from the National Science Foundation, which provided him a grant to log the effects of all the drilling in the area. His funding now comes from the Gulf Research Initiative (GRI), which is funded by BP. Read his full biography here.
Dr Jim Cowan with Louisiana State University's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences has been studying Gulf seafood, specifically red snapper, for more than 20 years. Funding is primarily via LSU, although LSU has also received funding via GRI. Read his full biography here.
Dr Andrew Whitehead, LSU, his lab conducts experiments and studies on Evolutionary and Ecological Genomics. He recently published "Genomic and physiological footprint of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on resident marsh fishes" in the National Academy of Sciences. Much of his funding also comes from the Gulf Research Initiative. Read his full biography here.
Brief summary of scientists' findings/studies:
Felder: Studies carried out from January 2010 to present in BP's Macondo well area. Found abnormalities in shrimp post-spill, whereas pre-spill found none.
Cowan: Studies carried out from Nov 2010-present, from west Louisiana to west Florida, from coast to 250km out. Found lesions/sores/infections in 20 species of fish, as many as 50 per cent fish in some samples impacted. Pre spill levels were 1/10 of one per cent of fish.
Whitehead: Species such as the Gulf Killifish, in and around the Gulf of Mexico, will continue to be subject to negative effects of the BP oil spill disaster of 2010. The Killifish, which researchers consider a good indicator of water quality in the Gulf of Mexico, is showing signs that the oil spill is having a negative impact on its health. Tracked killifish for the first four months after spill across oil-impacted areas of Louisiana and Mississippi.
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Gulf Seafood Deformities Raise Questions Among Scientists And Fisherman (VIDEO)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/gulf-seafood-deformities-raise-questions_n_1434268.html?ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=041912&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NewsEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief
The Huffington Post | By James Gerken Posted: 04/18/2012 12:59 pm Updated: 04/18/2012 5:31 pm

While the true extent of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill was not known for about 4 years, as Al Jazeera notes in the video above, the repercussions of BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico may become apparent more quickly.
Discovering eyeless shrimp, lesioned fish and other mutated and underdeveloped seafood, fisherman in the Gulf are pointing fingers at the BP spill. Biologist Dr. Darryl Felder told the news agency that Gulf seafood populations are dropping at alarming rates and that species richness is "diminished."
The Gulf Restoration Network's Scott Eust explained the bizarre shrimp deformities. "We have some evidence of deformed shrimp, which is another developmental impact. So, that shrimp's grandmother was exposed to oil while the mother was developing, but it's the grandchild of the shrimp that was exposed grows up with no eyes."
Al Jazeera reports that both the government and BP maintain that Gulf seafood is safe. BP released a statement last week, saying, "Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is among the most tested in the world, and according to the FDA and NOAA, it is as safe now as it was before the accident."
A study published last October in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that the FDA allowed "up to 10,000 times too much contamination" and didn't identify the risks to children and pregnant women posed by contaminated seafood. Additionally, the study charged that the FDA's "scientific standards [in 2010] were less stringent" than after the Exxon Valdez spill, reported OnEarth.
Government testing standards were questioned months after the spill. In December 2010, a toxicologist with a team challenging the FDA's seafood testing said, the "FDA simply overlooked an important aspect of safety in their protocol," reported MSNBC.
Despite sales dropping precipitously following the spill, the Gulf's seafood industry was given a boost after the government's Defense Commissary Agency began selling Gulf seafood products on 72 East Coast military bases in early 2011, reported AP.

The BP Cover-Up

BP and the government say the spill is fast disappearing—but dramatic new science reveals that its worst effects may be yet to come.

By Julia Whitty | Tue Aug. 10, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

Read also: The rest of this special report [1]and MoJo's complete BP coverage [2].
WE'RE SWINGING ON ANCHOR this afternoon as powerful bursts of wind blow down through the Makua Valley and out to sea. The gales stop and start every 15 minutes, as abruptly as if a giant on the far side of the Hawaiian island of Oahu were switching a fan on and off. We sail at the gusts' mercy, listing hard to starboard, then snapping hard against the anchor chain before recoiling to port. The intermittent tempests make our work harder and colder. We shiver during the microbursts, sweat during the interludes, then shiver again from our own sweat.
I'm accompanying marine ecologist Kelly Benoit-Bird of Oregon State University, physical oceanographer Margaret McManus of the University of Hawaii-Manoa, and two research assistants aboard a 32-foot former sportfishing boat named Alyce C. On the tiny aft deck, where a marlin fisher might ordinarily strap into a fighting chair, Benoit-Bird and McManus are launching packages of instruments: echo sounders tuned to five frequencies; cameras; and a host of tools designed to measure temperature, salinity, current velocity, chlorophyll fluorescence, and zooplankton abundance, all feeding into computers lashed into the tiny forward cabin.

Despite the impressive technology crammed aboard the boat, its deployment is pure 19th century. At any given time, two of us man the aft winch, launching the equipment overboard by hand, feeding out dual lines of nylon and coaxial cable, slowly wearing calluses into our gloves as we ease the instruments through the water column at roughly 33 feet per minute. Six feet shy of the bottom, 74 feet down, the rig is hauled back up, collecting data the whole way. The process is repeated around the clock for the next 24 hours, a procedure either monotonous or meditative, depending on your frame of mind. Near the bottom, McManus calls, "Making a mark." She might as well be calling "mark twain."
But whereas old-time riverboat captains sounding with lead-weighted ropes were gleaning information about safe shipping channels and shifting sandbars, we're sounding for signs of life. To the untrained eye, the incoming echo soundings appear as waves of blue, green, and yellow scrolling horizontally across our computer monitors. To the trained eye, they appear as layers of life flooding in on darkness. Benoit-Bird points toward the screens, each one tuned to read the sonar signature of a different-size life form. "That layer is zooplankton," she says. "And that layer is fish." Suddenly, I can see a crude facsimile of the migrations of the nighttime sea.

Creatures living in the deep scattering layer of the Gulf of Mexico include juveniles like this octopod.

Lantern fish like this one are a keystone species in the marine food web.

DSL species like hatchetfish have light-emitting organs.
Photos: Octopod and Hatchetfish: Dante Fenolio/Photo Researchers Inc.; Lantern fish: Paulo de Oliveira/Photolibrary

Most of the marine life familiar to us at the surface inhabits the epipelagic zone, the sunlit realm, stretching down to about 600 feet. Yet many whales, dolphins, seals, sea turtles, sharks, manta rays, billfish, and smaller predatory fish are nocturnal hunters, dependent on the mysterious movements of a vast community of organisms known as the deep scattering layer [3] (pdf), or DSL. This aggregation of life forms was unknown until the 1920s, when early hydrographers mapping the ocean with sound encountered a daytime "seafloor" around 3,300 feet, which rose perplexingly toward the surface at night. Named for its echo-reflecting signature, the DSL was eventually recognized by marine biologists in 1948 to be layers of living creatures hiding on the cusp between perpetual twilight and darkness.
What the echo sounders of old were actually picking up were the billions of swim bladders (buoyancy floats) of the fish inhabiting the dark realm of the DSL—primarily lantern fish, bristlemouths, and hatchetfish. These fish, generally between one and twelve inches long, are endowed with the usual fishy hardware of fins, scales, lateral lines, and tails. But their habit of hiding in the darkness by day and chasing darkness upward at night led to the development of extraordinarily large eyes and organs, known as photophores, capable of producing light—usually a weak blue, green, or yellowish light—the color and pattern of which signal the fish's species and gender, as well as information used in shoaling and other communications we don't understand. The photophores also create a camouflage known as counterillumination. By adjusting internal dimmer switches, these mesopelagic ("middle sea," or twilight zone) fish match the slightest overhead ambient light level—be it the faint glow of the sun or moon—making their silhouettes less visible to predators above and below.
DSL species rise at night—some to waters as shallow as 30 feet deep—for a variety of reasons: Some are avoiding the daytime surface hunters; others are avoiding the nocturnal hunters of the DSL who don't rise (like lancetfish); still others are saving energy by spending their days in a sleeplike state prompted by the frigid waters. (The alternative, living only at the warm surface, produces a fast metabolism requiring more food.) Krill, among the most abundant and important invertebrates of the DSL, rise at night to graze on the pastures of the sea: single-celled phytoplankton, plants that survive only in the sunlight zone.
The lantern fish, bristlemouths, hatchetfish, and crustaceans of the DSL are believed to account for 80 percent of all the biomass in the mesopelagic zone, with lantern fish alone making up some 660 million tons [4] of living fish—perhaps the greatest distribution [5], population, and species diversity of all ocean fish on the planet. The mesopelagic fauna also includes many kinds of squid, krill, and siphonophores and ctenophores (jellyfish-like animals), as well as worms, sea butterflies, and larvae that comprise the DSL zooplankton. The vast life of the deep scattering layer supports the surface life above it, including the $172 billion global seafood and aquaculture industries [6] (pdf).

[7]
Click on the image to expand to full size.

It's no wonder then that most of the predators of the sunlit sea make their living diving to meet the DSL, which rises like a great dumbwaiter from the deep bearing every manner of seafood delicacy on a platter of darkness. No wonder, too, that the DSL is being eyed by the fishing industry as the last great resource to be exploited.
Not long after dark, dolphins show up on the data stream, monopolizing the monitors with bold red and orange signatures. These are spinner dolphins who've spent the daytime hours resting in shallow coastal waters, hiding from sharks, sleeping with eyes wide open and their echolocation shut down. During the couple of years in the '90s I spent filming a documentary about spinners, darkness marked the frustrating end of our workday, the time we were forced to leave the school behind, to listen wistfully to the sounds of their leaps and spins as they splashed on an ocean surface we could no longer see. They were racing offshore to begin diving into the deep scattering layer. This much we knew. But in filmmaking parlance, it was called "dip to black." Because what the dolphins did down there in the dark was unknown, and seemingly unknowable.
JUST ABOUT THE TIME WE drop anchor off Oahu, and unbeknownst to us, a catastrophe is being unleashed 4,400 miles and five time zones away, in the Gulf of Mexico. A mile below sea level, methane is shooting up the experimental well [8] drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig, exploding at the well's head, killing 11 workers, and igniting a firestorm. After 36 hours of a raging inferno [9]—and still unknown to any of us—the rig will sink and open a valve to the gargantuan reservoir of the Macondo oil field, estimated to contain perhaps as much as 1 billion barrels, or 42 billion gallons, of crude.
Though it won't be understood for weeks, the Deepwater Horizon is different from any other spill in human history. The extreme technology used to drill at unprecedented depths lacks the extreme safety equipment and protocols needed to stave off disaster. BP, gambling [10] at the border of controllable engineering, has lost spectacularly in its bid to be the deepest and cheapest driller of them all.
And no one is ready for it. Not the Minerals Management Service, catering submissively to BP's laughable Gulf oil-spill "plan," a document featuring wildly inaccurate wildlife assessments [11] (including walruses and other species nonexistent in the Gulf) and an on-call expert who's been dead for years. Not the scientists whose research is paid for by the oil cowboys. Not the environmental groups, who did not foresee the stupendous potential for cataclysm on oil's farthest frontier. Not the media, who almost entirely ignored the sneak preview offered last year by the blowout of the West Atlas rig [12] drilling in the Timor Sea off Australia—a disaster that required five attempts at a relief well and 74 days to stanch. Far offshore, far from sight, far beyond the typical royalty-paying boundaries [13], BP and its partners have transformed themselves into modern-day pirates, operating beyond law or conscience. Their reckless quest has endangered and perhaps condemned not just the Gulf Coast, but the largest, richest, most pristine, most biologically important, and last completely unprotected ecosystem left on Earth: the deep ocean.
Despite an ever-expanding estimate of the volume of the spill, relatively little oil washes ashore at first, and only a small portion ever will. Instead, trapped in the deep, the oil fouls the ocean's twilight and dark zones: the mesopelagic and the bathypelagic (bathos: deep). After April 20, the dumbwaiter rising through the waters of the Gulf of Mexico will be ascending an ocean fouled with a toxic broth of oil, methane, chemical dispersants, and drilling mud. The relatively small amounts of oil washing ashore, and the relief felt when the surface oil began to dissipate, hardly account for the devastation being wrought in the dark world beyond our sight.

Bird rescue workers examine a dead juvenile roseate spoonbill in Fort Jackson, Louisiana. Photo: Matt Slaby/LUCEO Images
SIX WEEKS AFTER THE Deepwater Horizon explosion, I'm aboard a small inflatable Greenpeace boat, bucking the marshy waters of Barataria Bay, Louisiana. A tide change is under way. Incoming and outgoing waters are flowing in opposing directions, battling each other in current lines inked with oil. A continuous flow of vessels chug through the pass—tugboats, barges, mud boats, seiners, trawlers, pirogues, airboats, sportfishers, pleasure cruisers. Some carry crews to and from the thousands of other drilling platforms puncturing the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico, but the majority are now laden with containment boom and BP cleanup crews.
Dolphins are swimming in the pass too, a few dozen of an estimated 138 to 238 bottlenose dolphins that call Barataria Bay home. They're hugging the greasy waves of the tidal rip. Like bottlenose dolphins the world over, and like much marine life in general, they're exploiting the edge where waters of different provenance (temperature, salinity, velocity) hide predators from prey and vice versa. Along these edges, the sensory systems of the sea—sight, sound, pressure wave, magnetic field—are dimmed or distorted, making it difficult to see from one side through to the other. Bottlenose dolphins use the distortions as natural hunting blinds.
These waters have been off-limits to human fishers for weeks. But nobody told the dolphins. They're actively fishing the tidal rip and following trawlers dragging boom, because these are the same boats that sometimes give them food in the form of bycatch thrown overboard.

"Oil is toxic to most life. And Corexit is toxic to most life. But the most toxic of all is oil that's been treated with Corexit."

As best we know, the dolphins of Barataria Bay [14] comprise a closed population whose members rarely if ever leave the bay. In theory, they could now exit, but in all likelihood they're trapped here by multiple barriers: by oily waters, by seasonal tradition, by cultural habit, by territorial boundaries, and by the availability of food—including fish and other marine life that may be trying to escape the oil by swimming inshore. At the moment, the dolphins are feeding as best they can in home waters that will likely kill them.
Rick Steiner, a conservation specialist from the University of Alaska who's studied the effects of the Exxon Valdez spill for the past 21 years, discusses these possibilities as we look on helplessly. "The dolphins aspirate oily fumes through their blowholes," he says. "They're eating fish exposed to oil. They're getting oil in all their orifices. They're bathed in a continual soup of oil. There's nowhere to go to get away from it. We know [15] from the Exxon Valdez that even those animals not killed outright suffer lesions in their organs, including the brain. They go blind. They experience reproductive failures, changes in their blood chemistry, and possibly multigenerational changes passed down to offspring never even exposed to the oil."
A few hundred yards away, tucked into the marsh grass on Grand Isle State Park, we see a dead dolphin, half-skeletonized, half-mummified. In the heat and humidity of coastal Louisiana, it is hard to tell if it'd been dead a week or a month. We do know that dead dolphins are washing up [16] along the Gulf Coast in higher-than-normal numbers. We don't know how many more have died at sea and sunk, never to be counted. On the beach surrounding the dead dolphin are hundreds of hermit crabs coated with a chocolatey syrup of oil, their tracks up the beach splattered as they fled the foul waters. The oil washing ashore is still actively bubbling. "Even though this concoction may have exploded from the well a month ago and has been wending its way ashore ever since, it's still full of volatile compounds like benzene," says Steiner. "Benzene's a known carcinogen, dangerous to human life, too."
Barataria Bay has become a hospice wilderness, full of dying plants and animals. Nearly all the marshy islands are oiled. The oyster beds covering 10 percent of the bay [17] (pdf) are dead or dying and now closed to human harvesting. The post-larval brown shrimp [18] (pdf) migrating into the bay (the estuaries of Louisiana and Texas are home to the highest densities of brown shrimp in US waters) are running an oily gauntlet. So are the speckled trout that normally feast on brown shrimp during their own breeding season. For the first time in my bird-watching life, I've seen multitudes of clapper rails—notoriously secretive marsh-dwelling birds—running down levees and roads in broad daylight trying to escape the oiled wetlands.
The fate of the marshes is inextricably linked to the fate of the deep ocean—and vice versa. The deep ocean seeds the marshes with the larvae of fish and invertebrates, which then repopulate the deep in their juvenile or adult stages. These inshore-offshore migrators include ecologically and commercially important species [19]. Fifty percent of the wetlands [20] in the lower 48 states line the Gulf of Mexico and produce more seafood than the Chesapeake Bay, South and Mid-Atlantic, and New England fisheries combined. Endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna, scheduled to spawn right now in the waters around the Deepwater Horizon blowout, migrate here because the Gulf's marshes—the ocean's womb—likely shelter and feed their larvae. Adult bluefin, deep divers, are hunting the depths to 3,300 feet [21] (pdf) in search of squid and crustaceans in the deep scattering layer. BP's oil will wallop them at all stages of their lives.
At Queen Bess Island, an important seabird rookery near the mouth of Barataria Bay, Steiner and I watch oily brown pelicans trying to preen themselves clean. I visited this same island a week ago; the downy pelican chicks who were still in the nest then are today slipping on oily rocks at the waterline. Where last week there were still a few dozen white pelicans, now there are only two, standing uncharacteristically alone, wings drooping in stress. Steiner points out the pelicans flying overhead, their bellies coated with oil. "Even those birds who are managing to avoid diving into contaminated water to feed are inadvertently floating on it," he says.

A dolphin carcass in Port Fourchon, Louisiana. Photo: Andy Levin
Death by oil [22] is a horrible way to go. Necropsies on birds reveal hypothermia resulting from oiled feathers, malnutrition resulting from the hypothermia, anemia from the shock and stress of hunger, and poisoning from the oil ingested and inhaled during preening. Although a few birds will escape the immediate lethal effects, their eggs and chicks will not. An experiment from the 1980s [23] with nesting Leach's storm-petrels—tiny seafaring birds breeding on islands off Newfoundland—found that birds exposed to crude oil or Corexit (the dispersant BP is using in the Gulf) lost more eggs and chicks than did control birds. This, even though the oil exposure was sublethal, and even if only one adult of the pair was oiled. Breeding success for adults generally returned to normal the following year—except in the case of birds exposed to the highest sublethal doses of oil or Corexit. Fewer of those birds returned to breed—indicating that their part in the experiment had proved lethal after all.
As bad as it is in Barataria Bay, it's only the beginning.
FROM THE OUTSET, BP has fought to control every aspect of its uncontrollable catastrophe other than the spill itself. It has wildly spun the numbers on the quantity of hemorrhaging oil. It has continued to dispense Corexit—above and below water—when ordered to stop [24]. It has restricted press access with Kafkaesque flair. Unable or unwilling to skim much oil, BP has poured its energies into skimming up all available resources: renting virtually every hotel room on the Louisiana shores, helping to keep the press at bay; buying the silence [25] of scientists with lucrative pay and confidentiality clauses; chartering nearly every boat on the coast and employing virtually every fisherman and captain made jobless by the spill. I find clusters of these men in the marshes and out in the Gulf, their boats tethered together so they can watch movies on the biggest boat's DVD player.
"They have to pay these guys to work or else they'll riot," says Carl Safina, marine conservationist and cofounder of the Blue Ocean Institute. "As it is, they're angry, drinking, griping in the bars. By paying them, BP is deflecting their anger. Plus some of them feel like they're really helping, even though BP's two prime cleanup methods—setting out boom and using dispersant—completely undermine each other."
The containment and absorbent boom that BP is deploying around beaches and marshes—largely ineffectively—is designed to do just that: contain and absorb oil. But the Corexit dispersant BP has flooded onto the leaking wellhead 5,000 feet down, and sprayed from the air onto the surface—some 2 million gallons in total—is designed to break up the oil. "Which one is it?" asks Safina. "Do you want to contain it or disperse it? It makes absolutely no sense to be doing both. Let's face it, with pollution, you count your lucky stars if you have what's called point-source pollution, that is, a single identifiable localized source of pollution, like the Deepwater Horizon. So what's BP doing with that? They're turning it into the worst pollution nightmare of them all: non-point-source pollution."

Cajun oysterman Flip Tayamen shows his nets clotted with the crude oil washing into Barataria Bay. Photo: James Balog/Aurora Photos
That's because untreated oil quickly rises to the surface, where it can be skimmed with relative ease. But treated with dispersant, it becomes a submerged plume, unlikely to ever float to the surface, and destined to migrate [26] through underwater currents to the entire Gulf basin and eventually the North Atlantic. "Oil is toxic to most life," says Steiner. "And Corexit is toxic to most life. But the most toxic of all is oil that's been treated with Corexit. Plus, dispersants may well kill [27] the ocean's first line of defense against oil: the natural microbes that break oil down for other microbes to eat." The EPA has never seriously examined Corexit's effects on marine life (see "Bad Breakup [28]"). Now it'll get the biggest and baddest field experiment of all time, as the flora and fauna of the shallows and the deep scattering layer collide with the dispersed plumes.
BP's schizophrenic approach to the cleanup becomes more insidious in light of the company's legal liabilities [29]: The Clean Water Act stipulates that BP must pay $1,100 for every barrel of oil proven to have been spilled—$4,300 per barrel if gross negligence is determined. But the use of dispersants clouds estimates of the spill's size, guaranteeing that the true number will never be known—since relatively little oil will ever wash ashore—and guaranteeing that BP's liability will be vastly underestimated.
Consider that while we've all been fixated on the true spill rate—is it 35,000 barrels a day? 60,000 barrels? More?—those figures are only estimates, and only of the oil. Few people realize that some 40 percent of what spews from the Deepwater Horizon well is methane, the primary component of natural gas—a dangerous greenhouse gas and a toxin to most life. Indeed, methane may hold the answer to the quantity of vented oil. David Valentine, a biogeochemist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, suggested in May in an op-ed [30] (pdf) in the journal Nature that plumes of dissolved methane could be used to calculate how much oil has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. But BP has blurred the evidence trail—intentionally or otherwise—by treating at least some of the escaping methane with methanol [31], another toxin, in an effort to prevent a dangerous buildup and possibly even another explosion. Nevertheless, around the spill site, Valentine and his colleagues found clouds of dissolved natural gas at 100,000 times the normal density and at depths of more than 2,500 feet. They also found that little of the gas seemed to be reaching the air. Which is good news for the atmosphere, but probably bad news for the ocean [32]. That's because the methane may also be powering up blooms of microbes that eat methane but use up the oxygen in the water as they do so—causing dead zones [33] where most life cannot survive. The Gulf of Mexico is already home to the second-largest dead zone on Earth; the last thing it needs is another. On the surface above the methane clouds, Valentine and colleagues discovered a mass kill of pyrosomes—free-floating colonies of jellyfish look-alikes that straddle the vertebrate-invertebrate divide, and an important food for sea turtles. It's not yet clear which of many smoking guns killed the pyrosomes. "We'll be working up the story of the relationship between dispersant, oil, gas, and the microbial community for some time to come," says Valentine.

Then there are the drilling fluids [34] contaminating the seafloor near the wellhead. Euphemistically called muds, these heavy fluids are pumped into wells to keep the highly pressurized oil and gas from exploding upward. BP's drilling muds have been pouring out of the wellhead, along with 30,000 barrels added in its failed "top kill" and other efforts to plug the leak. Along with oil, methane, methanol, and Corexit, drilling fluids add their own frightening recipe to the disaster: arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, barite, fluoride, chrome lignosulfonate, vanadium, copper, aluminum, chromium, zinc, radionuclides, and other heavy metals. Relief wells require pumping [35] thousands more barrels of drilling fluid into the reservoir, with all the same risks of explosion attending the original well. The EPA estimates these drilling fluids will pose a threat to the seafloor and surrounding waters for up to 40 years. Plus a recent study finds that oil spills create a whole new pathway for arsenic [36] (pdf) pollution in the sea. The oil prevents seafloor sediments from bonding with and burying arsenic that naturally occurs in the ocean. This shutdown of the natural filtration system allows arsenic levels to rise from the deep water to the surface, disrupting photosynthesis in phytoplankton, increasing birth defects and triggering behavioral changes in marine life, and killing animals that feed on poisoned prey.

The rules of life are different in the gassy depths, where life capitalizes on the same fossil fuels we're drilling for.

Never before in human history has the vast food web of the ocean—rooted in the dark, and flowering at the surface—come under so many assaults from below, above, and within the water column: marine warfare masquerading as a cleanup.
"WE DOVE DOWN in clear water but came up 30 minutes later through oil," says Nancy Rabalais, director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON), a research station tucked deep in the marshes of southern Louisiana in the village of Cocodrie. A few weeks after the spill, during her summer research surveys 10 miles offshore, Rabalais personally encountered BP's plumes, which will probably affect her research far into the future. "It was horrible," she says, grimacing. "We were covered. Our gear was covered. We were breathing fumes and tasting oil."
The last time I saw Rabalais, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, LUMCON was trashed: the station evacuated, the marshes littered with drowned trees, broken boats, unroofed houses. The area is ruined in a whole new way today. Along with the oil, dispersant, benzene, and everything else creeping into the bayous, Cocodrie has become a staging point for BP—complete with Louisiana National Guard troops, workers recruited from all over the South, and fishermen hired away from their extinct jobs. These men are cashing in their lunch chits at the Coco Marina restaurant, where Rabalais, Ed Chesney—LUMCON's fisheries biologist—and I are grabbing a meal. We watch every manner of boat known to Louisiana speed up the narrow channels to the marina, their white hulls stained BP brown, their wakes slapping the cordgrass flat. The boats offload hundreds of hungry men.

Containment boom and fiddler crab covered with oil, Barataria Bay, Louisiana. Photo: James Balog/Aurora Photos
Rabalais is worried about the species already under enormous stress from a host of other environmental problems in the Gulf: dead zones, overfishing, chronic oil pollution, seismic testing for oil and natural gas, coastal erosion (see "Fate of the Ocean [37]," March/April 2006 issue [38]). "Brown pelicans just came off the endangered species list," she says, "and now some of their most important breeding rookeries are getting hit with oil." She's concerned about critically endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtles, the rarest on Earth, a species that faced mortal threat from the 140 million-gallon spill [39] (pdf) at the Ixtoc I drilling platform in the Gulf in 1979 (see a map of the world's biggest spills here [40]

[40]
Click on the image to expand to full size.). Kemp's Ridleys breed almost exclusively in the Gulf, with virtually every female returning to lay her eggs on a stretch of beach south of the Texas border.
In the wake of the BP spill, there's been a spike in sea turtle deaths [41], the majority of them Kemp's Ridleys. The number is certain to rise, since some sea turtles feed in the DSL, and most enjoy a meal of jellyfish. Sadly, they also eat blobs of oil they mistake for jellyfish. According to some reports, sea turtles have been roasted alive in the surface-oil patches burning offshore. Hundreds more have drowned since the disaster began. One shrimp fisherman privately admits that panicky colleagues fished hard in the weeks after the spill, knowing that the fishery would soon be closed, and some tied shut the mandatory turtle-excluder devices, which save turtles from drowning but reduce the efficiency of their nets.
Rabalais and others also worry about the Gulf's sperm whales, which feed on squid living in the deep scattering layer. An estimated 1,665 sperm whales inhabit [42] (and perhaps never leave) the northern waters of the Gulf. A recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) assessment calculated that even three additional deaths (by other than natural causes) could endanger the entire sperm whale population, since the whales breed infrequently and only in midlife. The whales favor the deep waters of Mississippi Canyon—the location of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead. On numerous occasions, they've been seen swimming through thick oil in that region. And it's not only sperm whales. The Gulf is home to 29 species of cetaceans, many of which feed on the DSL, including spinner dolphins, spotted dolphins, pilot whales, killer whales, and many secretive deep divers such as beaked and bottlenose whales. The filter-feeding whales—including the Gulf's tiny isolated population of Bryde's whales, plus humpbacks, fins, minkes, and sei, many of which are DSL feeders [43]—are vulnerable a whole different way [44], since oil fouls their baleen (sievelike teeth), dooming them to starvation.
And then there are the 400 Florida manatees, a species classified as vulnerable to extinction, that migrate to Louisiana [45] (pdf) waters each summer. This year they'll be feeding in oily water on oiled algae and cordgrass. "And it's not just the large fauna we worry about," says Rabalais. "The entire wetland is at risk. A marsh that's been heavily oiled becomes anaerobic at the roots. The next time a big storm comes through, those marshy islands will in all likelihood just break up and disappear." If so, they'll take the nursery grounds for marine life with them. Coastal Louisiana is already losing [46] 24 square miles of wetlands a year, a football field every 30 minutes. These dwindling wetlands are crucial to the Louisiana economy, keeping people here afloat in businesses from fishing to tourism. "Now they're all out of work," says Rabalais. "And the revenues we were counting on to rebuild the coastal habitats to foster the birds, shrimp, fish, dolphins, turtles, whales, and people will be lost."
Least certain of all is what's happening to the life at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Take the life that congregates around cold methane seeps [47], the first of which ever discovered was found in the Gulf in 1984. Since then, 50 more sites have been located [48] in these waters, some close to the Deepwater Horizon, with hundreds more likely out there—all home to otherworldly collections of crustaceans, snails, bacterial filaments, and tubeworms. The rules of life are different in the gassy depths, where life capitalizes on the same fossil fuels we're drilling for. Some cold-seep tubeworms have lifespans of 250 years. Others recently found in the deepest seeps may live to 500 or 600 years.
Though some of these creatures feed on methane, that doesn't mean they can survive the spill. "The quantity of oil and the added effects of dispersants are likely to harm these communities," says Lisa Levin, a biological oceanographer and cold-seeps specialist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Oil could smother the animals' feeding apparatus or suffocate the bacteria at the base of the food chain, she adds. "The tubeworms and other seep organisms, including perhaps deepwater corals, are so slow-growing that damage will likely be long lasting." Levin envisions a host of long-term chronic problems throughout the deep Gulf that might not even show up for decades.
Only 25 miles from the Deepwater Horizon blowout, a tremendously rich area known as the Pinnacles [49] hosts deepwater corals 300 to 500 feet below the surface. One of the Gulf's invisible splendors, these ancient reefs line the outer continental shelf south of Mississippi and Alabama. During the last ice age, when today's continental shelves were dry land, the Pinnacles were living coral reefs near the shoreline. Nowadays the fossil reefs lie too deep and dark for most reef-building corals or phytoplankton to survive. Instead, they're largely fueled by zooplankton, which power rich deepwater communities [50] of soft corals, sponges, feather stars, black corals, solitary hard corals, and predatory fish, including reef fish not found in shallow waters. The site is also a critical spawning habitat [51] for commercially important species like grouper and snapper.
"We lack even a good picture of life in the deep Gulf," says Ed Chesney. "Now we may never know what's been done to it." It's the classic iceberg equation: a nine-tenths submerged hazard, lurking unseen in the darkness. The big question: Will it wreck the Gulf of Mexico? "The best thing that might happen now," says Chesney, a battle-scarred veteran of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike, "is for one, two, three, or four hurricanes to blow through and bury all this pollution under layers of sediment."
His thinking is that the tons of silt accompanying storm surges would inter the contamination and prevent it from migrating further, while more silt stirred up offshore would provide particles for the emulsified oil droplets to adhere to and sink to the bottom. Huge offshore waves could also trigger subsurface landslides to bury some of the polluted seafloor under clean sediment: nature's dip to black.
Yet the potential benefits of hurricanes are accompanied by obvious risks. Hurricanes will drive pollution further inland. The 33,000 miles of pipeline in the Gulf's waters and marshes are critically vulnerable [52] to hurricane-induced waves (see chart [53]

[53]
Click on the image to expand to full size.). Seven weeks after the Deepwater Horizon spill, naval scientists released the results [54] (pdf) of research conducted when Hurricane Ivan swept through the Gulf in 2004. It found these pipelines to be far more vulnerable than previously thought to deep storm currents, which slosh for up to a week with enough force to break pipelines 300 feet deep. Plus every hurricane in this storm-prone region threatens the cement seals on 50,000 holes punched into the floor of the Gulf: some wells in deep water, many in the shallows, 27,000 of them abandoned and unmonitored [55], 600 once run by BP. The passage of Katrina spilled 8 million gallons of oil from platforms, pipelines, ships, and storage tanks—three-quarters as much oil as was dumped by the Exxon Valdez.
All of which adds up to the realization that our collective "don't ask don't tell" attitude toward the deep ocean—mining it, drilling it, overfishing it, dumping in it (including nuclear waste), polluting it, and deafening and killing its life with lethal sounds produced by the drilling industry and the military—is a prescription for ruin. "It's not that we were totally unprepared for the possibility of the Deepwater Horizon," says Carl Safina, "but that we were so spectacularly unprepared for its inevitability."

IRONICALLY, THE TOOLS Kelly Benoit-Bird and Margaret McManus are employing in Hawaii to decipher the deep scattering layer were developed by the offshore oil and gas industry and the military. "The DSL was a hot topic during the Cold War," says Benoit-Bird, "but only its acoustic properties, not its biological properties. American and Soviet navies wanted to know how to use its sound-reflecting properties to hide their submarines." In the 21st century, the application has shifted to the oil industry's fight to drill deeper, a battle spurring technological innovation in echo sounding and imaging equipment—including the "spill-cam," whose footage BP was finally pressured into releasing. "As offshore rigs proliferate and get deeper," says Benoit-Bird, "the once-prohibitively expensive gear attending them became cheaper and more accessible, to the point where the smallest players, the research scientists like Margaret and me, can now afford some of it."
The data streaming in from the waters off Oahu—the yellow, green, red, and blue bands scrolling across the computer monitors—are unprocessed data, designed to signal that the submerged gear is working correctly. Back in Benoit-Bird's office at Oregon State University, I watch the information transform into geek IMAX. The animations show spinner dolphins gathering in a circle of 16 to 28 animals, always an even number, each dolphin paired with another, the pairs arranged in an echelon formation: one animal slightly above and ahead of the next, while maintaining about three feet of separation. A perimeter of roughly 300 feet is precisely maintained as the dolphins swim in an undulating circle, trapping the fish inside the net of their swimming bodies.
One after another, in fixed sequence, two dolphin pairs directly opposite each other dart into the ball of fish to feed. As they return to the circle, four more follow. And so on. The action is extremely fast, the dolphins darting in to feed at a rate of roughly 1.25 prey per minute, all while swimming and circling in their roller-coaster pattern. After five minutes below, each pair has engaged in four feeding dashes, and the dolphins simultaneously surface to breathe. They typically grab only one or two quick breaths before diving, repeating the underwater rodeo over and over throughout the night without rest. "Our research [56] indicates that spinner dolphins are forced to fish hard and continually all night," says Benoit-Bird, "and to catch the biggest of these tiny four-inch-long fish they possibly can in order to meet their metabolic requirements."
In other words, they exploit a different kind of edge—the fine line between survival and starvation. This precarious balance tips back and forth across the food web of the deep scattering layer. "In order to really understand what the dolphins are doing," says Benoit-Bird, "we had to understand what their prey are doing. And in order to do that, we had to decipher what's behind the movements of the deep scattering layer. This investigation led us incrementally backward over time towards the smaller and smaller organisms—which, as it turns out, drive the entire system."
Margaret McManus was part of the team that first discovered a remarkable phenomenon rewriting our understanding of ocean dynamics—the formation of thin plankton layers in the ocean. These congregations of plankton, both the plant and animal varieties, may extend for many miles horizontally but inhabit a few feet on the vertical scale—sheets of life packed far, far more densely with life than the water just above or below them. The formation of thin layers is driven by the chemistry and physics of the ocean, as well as by the organisms themselves. Off Hawaii, they tend to form where cooler waters well up from the deep during tide changes.
McManus and Benoit-Bird have found that DSL fish will swim hard against prevailing currents in order to get to these dense aggregations of life. It's an energy-consuming choice offset by the rich feeding rewards. In Benoit-Bird's data animations, single fish dive into a thin zooplankton layer and swim up and down, back and forth, eating a doughnut hole in the layer. The spinner dolphins do something similar: diving to find patches of lantern fish that they then corral increasing the prey density by up to 200 times. "It's so congested in there for these nonschooling fish of the DSL," says Benoit-Bird, "that they're probably bumping into each other in confusion."
The emerging picture is one of an incalculably complex, finely tuned, and delicate interaction between predators and prey, chemistry and light, currents and water column, night and day. Some semblance of this spatial ballet, played in weightless three-dimensional darkness, has likely been part of the oceans since the oceans were brought to life: layers of life gathering in extremely high densities to feed or to avoid being eaten.
So what happens if you add millions of gallons of oil, dispersant, methane, and drilling fluid into the dense mix?
"We know that the deep scattering layer in the Gulf of Mexico—like the DSL everywhere—supports huge numbers and biomass of life," says Benoit-Bird, who has spent time studying the Gulf's sperm whales. "We know the DSL is super important to the life of those waters. We know it's constantly on the move, not only up and down, but inshore and offshore, back and forth, every day and every night. This greatly increases the likelihood that any given animal or layers of life will be exposed to the pollutants at some point in the course of their travels. And each of these exposures will cascade up and down through the food web."
Some early observations [57] of the effects of the Gulf catastrophe suggest the daily vertical migrations of the animals of the deep scattering layer may be blocked when they encounter plumes of oil and contaminants. If so, then trapped below a plume, the DSL fish and invertebrates would be unable to access their prey. Trapped above, they would be unable to escape their predators. Trapped within, they would probably die—and in their deaths, poison those who eat them. For the ocean, any loss of productivity in the deep scattering layer would be the biggest cataclysm of all—impoverishing the surface waters, depleting the coasts, cascading across the boundaries between ocean and land to denude both natural and human economies.

REPORT, BABY, REPORT

Mother Jones deployed four crack reporters to cover the BP/Deepwater Horizon spill. Read their daily stories at MotherJones.com and follow their Twitter feeds for up-to-the-minute updates.

Julia Whitty was researching oceanic technology when we retasked her to the Gulf. She reunited with researchers she'd met reporting on our troubled seas in 2005. Follow her: @juliawhitty [58].	Mac McClelland's stories on press restrictions, pitiful cleanup efforts, and BP workers gone wild have been noted by the likes of PBS, Newsweek, and Salon. Follow her: @macmcclelland [59].
Kate Sheppard is our energy and climate reporter. She was one of the first to write on the interplay between the spill size and liability, as well as shoddy dispersant regulations. Follow her: @kate_sheppard [60].	Josh Harkinson A Texas native and chronicler of MMS misdeeds, Josh dipped into his Rolodex to bring us inside stories of what happened on the day the rig exploded. Follow him: @joshharkinson [61].

BEFORE BEING WAYLAID by the oil tragedy, I was investigating the emergence of a better future for the ocean—one in which we could use our scientific and technological genius to create a new, exciting, and profitable relationship with our water world, a relationship based on respect and sustainability. I spent a few weeks in Hawaii, where the larvae of many promising ideas are circulating on scholarly and entrepreneurial currents.
At the University of Hawaii-Manoa, I met Luis Vega, who drifted years ago from his natal shores of Peru and landed in American academia. His shock of white hair and his melancholic, ironic air give him the guise of a poet. He told me that when he was working on clean energy in the Jimmy Carter years, he was a popular man. Then he weathered decades of solitude. "Now I'm popular again," he smiles self-deprecatingly.
Vega is one of the foremost modern developers of OTEC [62] (ocean thermal energy conversion) technology. He managed the design, construction, and operation of an experimental OTEC plant for the production of electricity at the National Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority (NELHA) On the Big Island from 1993 to 1998. Today Vega has a new grant, via the Department of Energy and Lockheed Martin, to essentially see if the technology is suitable for commercial investment. "Today, while we talk about wind, solar, and wave power," says Vega, "we're ignoring this energy inherent in the ocean, a source far more powerful, far more consistent, than any of those. The beauty of OTEC lies in its unshakable ability to provide energy 24/7, without any of the vagaries of wind, solar, or wave."
OTEC runs on the temperature differential between the ocean's deep dark waters and its warmer sunlit zone—the same differentials the creatures of the DSL exploit. In a closed OTEC system, warm surface waters are pumped through a heat exchanger to vaporize a low-boiling-point fluid, like ammonia. Cold deep seawater is simultaneously pumped through a second heat exchanger, creating a gradient that drives the vapor through a turbine to generate electricity. Finally, the cold seawater condenses the ammonia back into a liquid, to be recycled through the system. Both Japan and India are also experimenting with OTEC power plants.
OTEC isn't the deep water's only use [63]. At NELHA, the two cold-seawater pipes built for the last OTEC experimental plant today deliver water from between 2,000 and 3,000 feet deep to dozens of surrounding businesses. The 43-degree, extremely clean water enables aquaculture farms to grow cold-water seafood like Japanese abalone, flounder, oysters, and Atlantic lobster in the tropics. The deep water is also being used to raise aquarium fish and helps grow spirulina at one of the largest algae farms on Earth. The hope is that these methods could one day offer a sustainable alternative to wild-caught fish, especially disappearing species, like tuna.
But generating scalable commercial power would clearly be the killer app. The way Vega envisions our energy future [64], the first generation of OTEC "plant-ships" would be stationed offshore and send electricity via subsurface power cables to shore stations. Then, in 20 or 30 years, the technology would develop to the point where "grazing" OTEC plants could decouple from the land and roam tropical waters in search of the best temperature differentials. These second-generation plant-ships would exploit those differentials, using the energy to break down seawater and create energy-rich compounds like hydrogen or ammonia. Either could essentially serve as a battery—holding energy as it's transferred to land. And in the case of hydrogen, there might be a robust infrastructure in place to distribute liquid hydrogen (such an infrastructure is being built in California) to be used in fuel-cell vehicles.
Figuring out how or whether OTEC or any of these other alternate energy technologies can provide us with a livable future will take serious investment. Yet until now we've barely acknowledged the true costs of subsidizing "cheap" oil: not only the $4 billion a year in actual subsidies, but climate change, the risks to human health, environmental degradation, and disaster. In the wake of the Gulf of Mexico tragedy, alternative energy sources—OTEC, wave, tide, wind, or solar—no longer seem utopian, merely sane.
On the Big Island of Hawaii, the NELHA deepwater pipes run up near a beach park on the shoreline. In the early morning, I see a school of spinner dolphins in the blue water just beyond the breakers. Their night's intensive work finished, they're leaping and spinning their way back to shore. During my years filming spinner dolphins, I sometimes joined them underwater during their morning return to land. The sight was a marvel of speed and grace, dozens of slender bodies streaming below the surface at velocities that transformed the school into a waving, blurry contrail of gray and white and black. For me, stationary in the water while the spinners streamed past, as the sun ignited the twilight water, it felt like being inside the eye of a hurricane of intensive, productive, pure energy.

Swimming amid blobs of oil in Biloxi, Mississippi, late June 2010. Photo: Julie Dermansky/Polaris Images
On the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, as black doom wells up from the seafloor a mile down, I find oil on beaches repeatedly cleaned by hazmat crews. All I have to do is lean down and scratch an inch into the sand to find goop. It occurs to me that a new stratum is being written in the geological logbook of the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps someday to be known as the BP dark layer. Will history record it as the oily seam marking the end of an untenable energy era and the beginning of a better one?
A dip to black isn't always the end of the story. Sometimes it's followed by a fade up from black and a whole new scene.
If you liked this story by Julia Whitty, don't miss her features on mass extinction [48], the fate of the ocean [33], and the planet's 13th tipping point [65].

Source URL: http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/09/bp-ocean-cover-up

Links:
[1] http://motherjones.com/special-reports/2010/09/bp-oceans
[2] http://motherjones.com/category/primary-tags/bp
[3] http://motherjones.com/files/Source_List_92_Vol_18_Tont.pdf
[4] http://motherjones.com/files/Source_List_35_--_Lanternfish_Biomass.PNG
[5] http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/02sab/background/ecology/ecology.html
[6] http://motherjones.com/files/Source_List_161_00800736.pdf
[7] http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/09/hidden-damages
[8] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/08/bubble-of-methane-trigger_n_568842.html?view=print
[9] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2010/05/20/VI2010052003413.html
[10] http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100614/Hayward.BP.2010.6.14.pdf
[11] http://info.publicintelligence.net/BPGoMspillresponseplan.pdf
[12] http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/10/oil-still-spewing-australia
[13] http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/natural_gas/analysis_publications/ngmajorleg/continental.html
[14] http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/nefsc/publications/tm/tm201/312-321.pdf
[15] http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/sakhalin/eng/71/steiner5.html
[16] http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/oilspill/species_data.pdf
[17] http://motherjones.com/files/Source_List_61_La_Peyre_BMS_0.pdf
[18] http://motherjones.com/files/Source_List_62_hsi-054.pdf
[19] http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1042792
[20] http://www.harteresearchinstitute.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93:why-gulf&catid=1:the-institute&Itemid=280
[21] http://motherjones.com/files/Source_List__93_migratory2001.pdf
[22] http://www.ibrrc.org/oil_affects.html
[23] http://www.jstor.org/pss/2403614
[24] http://www.epa.gov/bpspill/dispersants.html#appl1
[25] http://blog.al.com/live/2010/07/bp_buys_up_gulf_scientists_for.html
[26] http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/07/year-life-bp-oil-spill
[27] http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/05/toxicity-aside-dispersants-could.html
[28] http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/09/bad-breakup
[29] http://donovanlawgroup.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/why-bp-does-not-want-an-accurate-measurement-of-the-gulf-oil-spill/
[30] http://motherjones.com/files/Source_List_94_Valentine_Nature_Opinion_2010_v465n27p421.pdf
[31] http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/05/_giant_dome_fails_to_fix_deepw.html#comment-104574
[32] http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100609/Joye.Statement.06.09.2010.pdf
[33] http://motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/fate-ocean
[34] http://www.drillfloor.com/Drilling_fluid/Well_control.html
[35] http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/575179/
[36] http://motherjones.com/files/Source_186_Oil_spills_raise_arsenic_levels_in_the_ocean_says_new_research_0.pdf
[37] http://motherjones.com/environment/2006/03/last-days-ocean
[38] http://motherjones.com/toc/2006/03
[39] http://motherjones.com/files/Source_49_ERCLargest_Spills_2_0.pdf
[40] http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/09/15-biggest-oil-spills
[41] http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2010/05/03/many-endangered-turtles-dying-on-texas-gulf-coast.html
[42] http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/sars/ao2009whsp-gmxn.pdf
[43] http://motherjones.com/files/Source_262_-_Whales_Feeding.png
[44] http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/uw330
[45] http://motherjones.com/files/Source_List_100_10.1.1.26.3246.pdf
[46] http://www.nwf.org/Wildlife/Wild-Places/Coastal-Louisiana.aspx
[47] http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/regulate/environ/chemo/chemo.html
[48] http://motherjones.com/environment/2007/05/gone
[49] http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2000/09/fieldwork4.html
[50] http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/islands01/background/islands/sup5_pinnacles.html
[51] http://na.oceana.org/sites/default/files/Wildlife_of_Gulf_of_Mexico_factsheet.pdf
[52] http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/05/hurricanes-threaten-gulf-pipelines
[53] http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/09/gulfs-other-time-bombs
[54] http://motherjones.com/files/Source_177__High_Sea-Floor_Stress_Induced_by_Extreme_Hurricane_Waves_1.pdf
[55] http://markudall.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=684
[56] http://people.oregonstate.edu/~benoitbk/reprints/Spinner dolphin cooperation.pdf
[57] http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2284
[58] http://twitter.com/juliawhitty
[59] http://twitter/macmcclelland
[60] http://twitter.com/kate_sheppard
[61] http://twitter.com/joshharkinson
[62] http://hinmrec.hnei.hawaii.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/OTEC-Summary-Status-Paper.pdf
[63] http://www.nelha.org/pdf/ARnelhaFY2009.pdf
[64] http://reis.manoa.hawaii.edu/reis2/reis/seminars/ocean-thermal-energy-conversion
[65] http://motherjones.com/environment/2006/11/thirteenth-tipping-point

Illustration: Tim O'Brien

The BP Cover-Up
What's Good for BP
BP's Bad Breakup: How Toxic Is Corexit?
BP's Damage Control: A Timeline
Plus More Articles by Julia Whitty
THE FULL TIME LINE OF MOTHER JONES REPORTING ON BP AND THE OIL SPILL
http://motherjones.com/category/primary-tags/bp
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Halliburton Admits It Skipped Test On Well Cement

by The Associated Press 29OKT10

Halliburton Co. acknowledged that it skipped a critical test on the final formulation of cement used to seal BP's oil well before it blew out catastrophically in the Gulf of Mexico.
The company, which was BP's cementing contractor, came under increased scrutiny when investigators from the president's oil spill commission revealed Thursday that tests performed by the company before the deadly blowout showed the cement to be unstable.
Halliburton in a statement issued late Thursday night said it did not conduct a stability test on the final mix of cement after a last-minute change by BP added more of a certain ingredient. Earlier statements by the company had said tests showed the cement to be stable.
The cement mix's failure to prevent oil and gas from entering the well has been identified by BP and others as one of the causes of the accident, the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
BP and Halliburton decided to use a foam slurry created by injecting nitrogen into cement to secure the bottom of the well, a decision outside experts have criticized.
The panel said Thursday that of four tests done in February and April by Halliburton, only one — the last — showed the mix would hold. But the results of that single successful test were not shared with BP, and may not have reached Halliburton, before the cement was pumped, according to a letter sent to commissioners Thursday by chief investigative counsel Fred H. Bartlit Jr.
Halliburton said Thursday that that successful test was performed on a mixture different than the one eventually used. While some tests were conducted on the new formulation requested by BP, those tests did not include a foam stability test, the company said.
According to the panel, BP at the time of the blowout had in hand results from only one of the tests — a February analysis sent to BP by Halliburton in a March 8 e-mail that indicated the cement could fail. The slurry tested in that case was a slightly different blend, and assumed a slightly different well design, but there is no indication that Halliburton flagged the problem for BP, or that BP had concerns, the letter said.
"Halliburton [and perhaps BP] should have considered redesigning the foam slurry before pumping it at the Macondo well," Bartlit wrote.
Independent tests conducted for the commission by Chevron on a nearly identical mixture were also released Thursday. The results concluded that the cement mix was unstable, raising questions about the validity of Halliburton's test showing that the near-final mixture was stable. The company said the "significant differences" between its internal tests and the commission's were caused by the use of different materials.
BP, as part of its internal investigation, also conducted independent tests that showed the cement mix was flawed, but its analysis too was criticized by Halliburton, which said it was not the correct formula. BP's report also mentioned a cement test Halliburton performed in mid-April, but it appears BP obtained the results after the accident and considered its methods flawed.
By contrast, the commission obtained proprietary additives from Halliburton as well as a recipe to re-create the slurry that was used on the well. One and a half gallons of the actual mix used on the rig remain, but it is being held as evidence in criminal and civil investigations.
Halliburton rejected the commission's claims that the February tests were conducted on a cement that was similar to the one used.
"Contrary to the letter...the slurry tested in February was not 'a very similar foam slurry design to the one actually pumped,'" the statement reads. The company also says there were significant differences in how the cement was tested.
Halliburton shares dropped from near $34 to below $30 in New York trading in the half hour after the commission released its finding. The shares recovered a bit, and closed at $31.68, down $2.74, or 8 percent. BP shares rose from $40.38 to $41.28, then quickly reversed course and fell to $40.28. The shares finished trading with a gain of 49 cents at $40.59.
The independent investigators do not address other decisions that could have contributed to the cement's failure and the eventual blowout, such as BP's decision to use fewer centralizers than recommended by Halliburton. Centralizers make sure the well's piping is centered inside the well so the cement bonds correctly.
BP has also been criticized for not performing a cement bond long, a test that checks after the cement is pumped down whether it is secure. There are also questions about whether BP pumped down enough cement to seal off the bottom of the well, which was located more than three miles below sea level.
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Gulf Oil Spill Report: BP Ignored Warning Signs On Doomed Well

WASHINGTON — BP and its contractors missed and ignored warning signs before to the massive oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, showing an "insufficient consideration of risk" and raising questions about the know-how of key personnel, a group of technical experts concluded.
In a 28-page report released late Tuesday night, an independent panel convened by the National Academy of Engineering said that the companies failed to learn from "near misses" and that neither BP, its contractors nor federal regulators caught or corrected flawed decisions that contributed to the blowout.
Those failures would be unacceptable in companies that work with nuclear power or aviation, said Donald Winter, a professor of engineering practice at the University of Michigan and chairman of the 15-member study committee.
"A great number of decisions, all of which appear to us to be questionable ... also appeared to be justified by those individuals and those companies involved," Winter said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press. "In an operation like this you have to recognize the uncertainties of where you are going."
BP, and its contractors, apparently did not have such recognition, Winter said, even though drilling an exploratory well more than three miles beneath the ocean's surface involves significant unknowns, such as the underlying geology.
Among the hazards highlighted in the panel's report were several tests that indicated the cement at the bottom of the hole would not be an effective barrier to an influx of oil and gas. More than one month before the disaster, BP also lost drilling materials deep in the hole – a situation that hinted to the challenges of the well but was not used to address risks.
The report's technical findings – the second from an independent entity – mirror those discovered in previous investigations by BP, lawmakers and the president's oil spill commission. However, the panel focused more than other probes on how decisions were made.
Still, the report said it may not be possible to ever establish exactly what happened because much of the evidence was lost when 11 workers died and the rig sunk in April.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar asked in May for the investigation by the academy, saying he wanted "an independent, science-based understanding of what happened."
In a statement issued Wednesday, Salazar and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management director Michael Bromwich said the committee's work will help guide the department to strengthen standards and oversight of offshore oil and gas recommendations.
A final report is due June 2011.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/17/gulf-oil-spill-report-bp-_n_784656.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=111710&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NewsEntry&utm_term=Daily+Brief
___
Online:
http://www.nationalacademies.org
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Justice Department Sues BP, Others Over Gulf Spill

by NPR Staff and Wires

Attorney General Eric Holder announces a civil lawsuit against BP and eight others in an effort to recover billions of dollars from the Gulf oil spill. At right is Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson.

Enlarge Alex Wong/Getty Images Attorney General Eric Holder announces a civil lawsuit against BP and eight others in an effort to recover billions of dollars from the Gulf oil spill. At right is Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Attorney General Eric Holder announces a civil lawsuit against BP and eight others in an effort to recover billions of dollars from the Gulf oil spill. At right is Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson.

December 15, 2010

The Justice Department on Wednesday sued BP and eight other companies in the Gulf oil spill disaster in an effort to recover billions of dollars from the largest offshore spill in U.S. history.
The Obama administration's lawsuit asks that the companies be held liable without limitation under the Oil Pollution Act for all removal costs and damages caused by the spill, including damages to natural resources. The lawsuit also seeks civil penalties under the Clean Water Act.
Attorney General Eric Holder said the lawsuit represents the beginning of a long legal fight. Justice Department lawyers have been working night and day, he says, to hold BP, Transocean and other companies accountable for the explosion and the spill that followed.
"While today's civil action marks a crucial first step forward, it is not ... a final step," he said at a news conference. "Both our criminal and civil investigations are continuing, and our work to ensure that the American taxpayers are not forced to bear the costs of restoring the Gulf area and its economy goes on."
The federal lawsuit says inadequate cementing of the well contributed to the disaster. Similar charges were made by BP in its internal investigation, and by the independent presidential oil spill commission. But Halliburton Co., the contractor in charge of mixing and pumping the cement, is not named in the suit.
Holder said additional defendants could be added to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit doesn't ask for a specific amount of money.
Tony West, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's civil division, said it's going to take years to fully quantify what the damages are to the environment, to natural resources, and any other economic damages.
"We've explicitly reserved in our complaint the right to come back and add claims or to add defendants if necessary," he said.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said plans are under way to try and give money back to Gulf communities.
"This is about getting a fair deal for the region that suffered enormous consequences from this disaster," she said.
An explosion that killed 11 workers at BP's Macondo well in April led to oil spewing from the company's undersea well — more than 200 million gallons in all by the government's estimate. BP disputes the figure.
The department filed the suit in federal court in New Orleans.

A Guide To The Many Inquiries Into The BP Oil Spill

There are at least five government investigations -- and all of them have their own weaknesses.

The other defendants in the case are Anadarko Exploration & Production LP and Anadarko Petroleum Corp.; MOEX Offshore 2007 LLC; Triton Asset Leasing GMBH; Transocean Holdings LLC, Transocean Offshore Deepwater Drilling Inc., and Transocean Deepwater Inc.; and Transocean's insurer, QBE Underwriting Ltd./Lloyd's Syndicate 1036.
Anadarko and MOEX are minority owners of the well that blew out. Transocean owned the rig that BP was leasing.
Transocean disputed the allegations, arguing it should not be held liable for the actions of others. "No drilling contractor has ever been held liable for discharges from a well under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990,'' the company said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. "The responsibility for hydrocarbons discharged from a well lies solely with its owner and operator.''
QBE/Lloyd's can be held liable only up to the amount of insurance policy coverage under the Oil Pollution Act and is not being sued under the Clean Water Act.
The lawsuit alleges that safety and operating regulations were violated in the period leading up to April 20.
It says that the defendants failed to keep the Macondo well under control during that period and failed to use the best available and safest drilling technology to monitor the well's conditions. They also failed to maintain continuous surveillance and failed to maintain equipment and material that were available and necessary to ensure the safety and protection of personnel, equipment, natural resources and the environment, the suit charges.
Democratic Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Democrat and a member of the House energy panel that is investigating the spill, acknowledged that the government will have a tough fight on its hands since BP has already taken an aggressive stance regarding its liability.
"It may have taken these companies months to cap their well, but they will spend years trying to cap their financial obligations to the people of the Gulf,'' Markey said. "That is why it is vital for the Obama administration to swiftly advance this legal action.''
Before Wednesday, potential class-action lawsuits had been filed in the Gulf oil spill by fishing and seafood interests, the tourism industry, restaurants and clubs, property owners losing vacation renters — even vacationers who claim the spill forced them to cancel and lose a deposit. So far, more than 300 lawsuits have been spawned by the spill and consolidated in federal court in New Orleans.
Wednesday's move by the Justice Department follows the Obama administration's decision not to open new areas of the eastern Gulf and Atlantic seaboard to drilling. That marked a reversal from an earlier decision to hunt for oil and gas, an announcement the president himself made three weeks before the spill.
The staff of a presidentially appointed commission looking into the spill has said that the disaster resulted from questionable decisions and management failures by three companies: BP, the well owner and operator; Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig; and Halliburton.
The panel found 11 decisions made by these companies increased risk. Most saved time, and all but one had a safer alternative.
Separately, an administrator is doling out money to Gulf oil spill victims from a $20 billion fund of BP money.
The Justice Department is not the first government entity to sue BP. Alabama Attorney General Troy King filed federal lawsuits in August on behalf of the state against BP, rig owner Transocean, cement contractor Halliburton Energy Services Inc. and other companies that worked on the ill-fated drilling project.
U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier is presiding over most of the consolidated federal suits. In September, Louisiana Attorney General James "Buddy'' Caldwell's office asked Barbier to create a "government case track'' to handle government-related suits separately from other claims. The judge hasn't ruled on that request yet.
NPR's Carrie Johnson contributed to this report, which contains material from The Associated Press.

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Berms To Block Oil A Giant Waste, Gulf Panel Finds 16DEZ10

by The Associated Press

Sand barriers are seen next to Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands, in the Gulf of Mexico, on Wednesday. A presidential commission says the berms, which were erected to protect the coastline, were a waste of money.

Enlarge Gerald Herbert/AP Sand barriers are seen next to Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands, in the Gulf of Mexico, on Wednesday. A presidential commission says the berms, which were erected to protect the coastline, were a waste of money.

Gerald Herbert/AP

Sand barriers are seen next to Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands, in the Gulf of Mexico, on Wednesday. A presidential commission says the berms, which were erected to protect the coastline, were a waste of money.

December 16, 2010

The big set of sand barriers erected by Louisiana's governor to protect the coastline at the height of the Gulf oil spill was criticized by a presidential commission Thursday as a colossal, $200 million waste of BP's money so far.
Hardly any oil ever reached the berms, government documents obtained by The Associated Press show.
Gov. Bobby Jindal, who pushed the venture over the objections of scientists and federal agencies, has strongly defended it. And despite the commission's scathing report, he plans to move ahead with the project, though with some changes to make it more beneficial.
In its stinging report, the commission said that its staff can "comfortably conclude that the decision to green-light the underwhelmingly effective, overwhelmingly expensive Louisiana berms project was flawed.''
Jindal ordered the berms built and secured money from BP to do it out of frustration over what he saw as inaction by the federal government. The idea was popular in Louisiana but became a source of tension between Louisiana and the Obama administration, which grudgingly approved the plan.
Jindal's aides referred questions Thursday to Garret Graves, an official who has been helping coordinate the berm project for the state. Graves vehemently disputed the report.
"There's not a federal agency or state agency that has any accurate data on how much oil was captured, so to use that as a metric for success is absurd,'' Graves said.
A BP spokeswoman said the company had no comment.
Roughly 14 miles of sand barriers have been built so far using sediment dredged up off the coast and within the Mississippi River Delta. As of October, some 350 million cubic feet of sand had been moved to make the barriers, the equivalent of digging 665 miles of four-lane interstate, according to the state.
The state initially wanted to build 101 miles of berm, but was given emergency approval to build 36 miles.
BP originally committed $360 million to the project. Of that, $195 million has been spent so far. The state plans to spend the rest.
Graves said officials will continue pumping sediment, but instead of extending the sand barriers lengthwise, they will be made deeper. He said that will allow them to serve a dual purpose: protecting the shoreline from oil and restoring the coast.
Jindal, a first-term Republican governor and former congressman, has been fundraising heavily out of state and has been mentioned as possible presidential hopeful in 2012. In a new book, he calls the berms "our last line of defense,'' and in a national television interview, he described them as a "great success.''
"We disagree,'' the commission said in its report. "From a long-term coastal restoration perspective, the berms may indeed be a 'significant step forward,' as Gov. Jindal has claimed, but they were not successful for oil spill response.''
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BP, Transocean, Halliburton blamed by presidential Gulf oil spill commission

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 6, 2011; 12:00 AM

The presidential oil spill commission on Wednesday blamed the Gulf of Mexico oil spill last year on "missteps and oversights" by oil giant BP, rig owner Transocean and contractor Halliburton, saying those errors were "rooted in systemic failures" and could happen again.
The commission said that the April 20 blowout at BP's Macondo well was not inevitable, but rather a failure of management in which officials from all three firms ignored critical warning signs and failed to take precautions that might have delayed the completion of the well but also might have averted the environmental disaster.
In a chapter released from the final report due out next week, the commission said: "The blowout was not the product of a series of aberrational decisions made by rogue industry or government officials that could not have been anticipated or expected to occur again. Rather, the root causes are systemic and, absent significant reform in both industry practices and government policies, might well recur."
The document provided a detailed account of the missteps that led to the spill, but most of the details have been revealed in other reports or investigations so far. It recounts fateful decisions by all three major corporate actors, including the failure to use enough centralizers to keep the pipe in the middle of the well, choices about the type of steel pipe used, and failure to heed or share test results suggesting that the cement used to seal the well could fail.
In the case of the failure to use enough centralizers, the report said that "the evidence to date does not unequivocally establish whether" that was a "direct cause" of the blowout, but the commission said that it "illuminates the flaws in BP's management and design procedures, as well as poor communication between BP and Halliburton."
The commission report also cited a Dec. 23, 2009, North Sea incident on one of Transocean's rigs, which the commission said was an "eerily similar near-miss" to what happened at the Macondo well. Though Transocean told the commission the incident was irrelevant, the commission said, "The basic facts of both incidents are the same. Had the rig crew been adequately informed of the prior event and trained on its lessons, events at Macondo may have unfolded very differently."
William K. Reilly, co-chairman of the commission appointed by President Obama, said that the commission had concluded that the blowout reflected "a more pervasive problem" within the oil industry.
"Given the documented failings of both Transocean and Halliburton, both of which serve the offshore industry in virtually every ocean, I reluctantly conclude we have a system-wide problem," Reilly said.
Former senator and commission co-chair Bob Graham stressed the failure of regulators. He said, "The Macondo blowout was the product of several individual missteps and oversights by BP, Halliburton and Transocean, which government regulators lacked the authority, the necessary resources and the technical expertise to prevent."
The Interior Department issued a statement saying that it has "already identified, acknowledged, and spent months working aggressively to reform" offshore drilling. It said it would "continue to make the changes necessary to restore the American people's confidence in the safety and environmental soundness of oil and gas drilling and production on the Outer Continental Shelf."
Last May, President Obama appointed Reilly and Graham to oversee the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling and gave them a January 2011 deadline to submit a report. Unlike Congress, the Justice Department or other probes, the oil spill commission lacked subpoena power but still sought to uncover the reasons for the disaster. It also criticized federal regulators and some Obama administration members for their response to the spill.
But the most detailed descriptions in the chapter released Wednesday were of communications and decisions by BP, Transocean and Halliburton.
"The immediate cause of the Macondo blowout was a failure to contain hydrocarbon pressures in the well," the report said. "Three things could have contained those pressures: the cement at the bottom of the well, the mud in the well and in the riser, and the blowout preventer. But mistakes and failures to appreciate risk compromised each of those potential barriers, steadily depriving the rig crew of safeguards until the blowout was inevitable and, at the very end, uncontrollable."
The report highlighted a series of decisions that led to time-saving and cost-saving measures when alternatives were available. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said the report showed "that the underlying profits-over-safety pathology may be in temporary remission, but not fully cured."
The report said, "Most of the mistakes and oversights at Macondo can be traced back to a single overarching failure - a failure of management."
BP said it supports the commission's efforts and "is working with regulators and the industry to ensure that the lessons learned from Macondo lead to improvements in operations and contractor services in deepwater drilling." It said that it has already "instituted significant changes designed to further strengthen safety and risk management."
Transocean, meanwhile, sought to place blame with BP and regulators. "Consistent with industry standards, the procedures being conducted in the final hours were crafted and directed by BP engineers and approved in advance by federal regulators," the company said in a statement. "Based on the limited information made available to them, the Transocean crew took appropriate actions to gain control of the well. They were well trained and considered to be among the best in the business."
Halliburton issued a statement sharply criticizing the presidential commission and BP. It blamed BP for failing to run a cement bond log test, which it called "the only means to test the integrity of the cement bond." It said "had BP properly interpreted the negative tests, the tests would have revealed any problems with the cement job." The company also reiterated disputes about the commission's description of February and April lab tests of cement mixtures as failures, and asserted that Halliburton's engineer on the Deepwater Horizon rig had received notice of satisfactory test results. Halliburton also accused the commission of having "selectively omitted information we provided to them."
************************************************************

Did BP Spill Kill Hundreds More Dolphins?

— By Julia Whitty

| Tue Mar. 29, 2011 10:32 PM PDT

Killer whales. Photo by Pittman, courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.
A new paper in Conservation Letters calculates that the numbers of whales and dolphins killed in BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster could be 50 times higher than the number of carcasses found.
The authors—a high-powered list of renowned cetacean researchers from Canada, the US, Australia, and Scotland (including Scott Krause, who I filmed years ago for a documentary about North Atlantic right whales)—write of a general misperception of the Deepwater Horizon impact:

Many media reports have suggested that the spill caused only modest environmental impacts, in part because of a low number of observed wildlife mortalities, especially marine mammals.

Atlantic spotted dolphins. Photo by Bmatulis, via Wikimedia Commons.
Compared to the 1989 Exxon Valdez, with its iconic oiled otters and high body counts, the Deepwater Horizon seems, well, not so bad. The authors point out that "only" 101 dead cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) were found in the Northern Gulf of Mexico as of 7 November 2010. The number's misleading though.

The issue arises when policymakers, legislators, or biologists treat these carcass-recovery counts as though they were complete counts or parameters estimated from some representative sample, when in fact, they are opportunistic observations. Our study suggests that these opportunistic observations should be taken to estimate only the bare minimum number of human-caused mortalities.

Humpback whale. Photo by Whit Welles Wwelles14, via Wikimedia Commons.
So how many more whales, dolphins, and porpoises actually died? That problem is tough to figure to begin with and is compounded by a dearth of data in the Gulf—a fact that will work greatly in BP's favor when the time comes to levy fines.

The Gulf of Mexico is a semi-enclosed subtropical sea that forms essentially one ecosystem with many demographically independent cetacean populations. Some of these cetacean populations, such as killer whales (Orcinus orca), false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens), melonheaded whales (Peponocephala electra), and several beaked whale species, appear to be quite small, are poorly studied, or are found in the pelagic realm where they could have been exposed to oil and yet never strand. Small, genetically isolated populations of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) could have experienced substantial losses either inshore or offshore.

Atlantic spotted dolphins. Photo by Bmatulis, via Wikimedia Commons.
Two methods of extrapolation could shed light on how many cetaceans BP's disaster killed:

Compare abundance before the disaster to abundance after—but since we don't know the population size of whale and dolphins species in the Gulf before hand we're unlikely to notice anything short of "the most catastrophic decline" and maybe not even that.
Count the number of carcasses recovered—knowing that many will evade our count, having sunk, decayed, been scavenged, or drifted away. So adjust the counts upward to estimate total mortality. This approach is used to estimate bird deaths at power lines, where, in at least one instance, we now know that bird body counts underestimate total actual deaths by a whopping 32 percent.

The authors worked the two methods as best they could and added something more.

Given the magnitude of the spill and complexity of the response, quantifying the ecological impacts will take a long time. To contribute to this effort, we examined historical data from the Northern Gulf of Mexico to evaluate whether cetacean carcass counts in this region have previously been reliable indicators of mortality, and may therefore accurately represent deaths caused by the Deepwater Horizon/BP event.

Sperm whale. Photo courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.
Their methods and analysis suggest that an average of 4,474 cetaceans died in the northern Gulf every year between 2003 and 2007 from all causes, human and natural. Yet since an average of only 17 bodies were found in those years, the body count represented only ~0.4 percent of total deaths.

Consider, for example, one sperm whale being detected as a carcass, and a necropsy identiﬁed oiling as a contributing factor in the whale's death. If the carcass-detection rate for sperm whales is 3.4%, then it is plausible that 29 sperm whale deaths represents the best estimate of total mortality, given no additional information. If, for example, 101 cetacean carcasses were recovered overall, and all deaths were attributed to oiling, the average-recovery rate (2%) would translate to 5,050 carcasses, given the 101 carcasses detected.

Those are chilling numbers. Period. But also in light of the relatively tiny populations of cetaceans in the Gulf. Especially since most if not all cetaceans are highly social, and since oil and chemical dispersants likely injured, sickened, or killed entire clusters, schools, pods, matrilines, or groups at the same time—and may still be doing so.
The authors describe the near-lethal affect of the Exxon Valdez disaster on one well-known and well-studied pod of killer whales in Alaska.

In the ﬁrst year after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, the AT1 group of "transient" killer whales experienced a 41% loss; there has been no reproduction since the spill. Although the cause of the apparent sterility is unknown, the lesson serves as an important reminder that immediate death is not the only factor that can lead to long-term loss of population viability.

Pilot whale mother and calf. Photo by Clark Anderson via Wikimedia Commons.
The paper:

Williams. R, Gero. S, Bejder. L., Calambokidis. J, Kraus. S, Lusseau. D, Read. A, Robbins. J. Underestimating the Damage: Interpreting Cetacean Carcass Recoveries in the Context of the Deepwater Horizon/BP Incident. Conservation Letters. Wiley-Blackwell. March 2011, DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2011.00168.x

Crossposted from Deep Blue Home.

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