Our heebtrix thought that a gulf link would lively this up,
I didn't include a link, am asking our knowledgeable readers if they know of one.
This was informative, but no new activity:
http://joyeresearchgroup.uga.edu/public-outreach/research-cruise-blog
Is the Gulf of Mexico becoming radioactive? Or is it still full of oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster?
2.1 No, thematically related only in being a concrete exploration of disaster, even if the Swiss watercolorist's ideas are flaky. 2.2 That's my questions, where to read something informative. What's on the bottom, how bad were the effects of the surfactants, and are there assays on the shrimp that come from the region. Seafood inspection is lot-by-lot, done by FDA rather than USDA, outsourced inspection for imported food, yes outsourced to China for Chinese fish.
I don't know the protocol for domestic shrimp.
So now we're redacting "Ebola" so commenters don;t get quarantined.
Oh hey, just saw this. I'll be more around tomorrow than I am today, if folks have questions about non-radioactive types of damage.
Heebs, could you change the bat-signal in the post? I find the presidential title more suitable to my dignity.
Shit, Warren G. Harding is Batman? I may have to tweak Selah's costume a little before tomorrow night.
No, just a regular old bat.
How does it look now, really? Should we be eating shrimp? What's the 5-10 year outlook?
I'd love to see Batman recite the normalcy speech.
Okay, here I am for questions. There is a large group of things that are not known about the situation in the Gulf, and another large group of things that are probably known but not by me. Happily those two groups do not constitute the entire group of things that might be known about the Gulf, so there's at least some chance I'll be able to answer other questions more substantively than I can Charley's from 9. Sorry, Charley, here's the best I can do on that one:
I have no idea, sad to say. There is a whole lot of oil down there; lots of what leaked still hasn't been found. Still don't know how the dispersant played into contamination or is playing into biodegradation; still don't know to what extent multicellular organisms are encountering or being harmed by it, or to what extent the category of organisms encountering the oil overlaps with the category of organisms being caught for human consumption. The oil itself will mostly go away over time; the question is how dead what it landed on will be by then. If coral, probably pretty dead (with knock-on deadness for things that depend on the coral for habitat). If microbial communities in the sediment, probably not so dead. I tend to think it's good news that the fallout was patchy, but that's just a hunch.
Thanks! Quick, everybody ask everything you've always wanted to know while they're here.
Question I have always had on the Gulf thing was what was the scale of the incremental add to what I would assume was an already high baseline of "leaked" oil from all the hydrocarbon drilling, shipping, refining etc. that occurs in and on the edges of the Gulf of Mexico. Assume there may also be consequential differences with having the one big source versus a lot of dispersed one (and I assume the baseline for dispersant (or similar) was not actually very high). Ixtoc was nearly as big, it seems, but as I recall there was some mitigating factors that reduced its impact compared to Deepwater.
Right, the baseline is pretty horrifying, but still probably just around 10-20% of what came from the well. And lots of small spills are certainly going to have a different impact than one massive one. I don't have a good sense of how frequently Corexit (the dispersant) was deployed for the smaller spills, though I would like to think that there's a reasonably high threshold before its use is approved. One of the frustrating things in the immediate aftermath of the spill was that it was nearly impossible to get a sample of Corexit for analysis; since it's a complex and proprietary mixture, that makes it awfully tough to establish a baseline, or track its fate in the environment, or anything useful like that.
I should add that it's not obvious to me whether lots of small spills or occasional massive spills constitute the bigger threat to long-term ecosystem health. There are a lot of factors at play. There's a lag between the appearance of oil and the response of microbial communities, but (depending on timing and spatial distribution) with lots of small spills, each could effectively prime the community to respond to the next. How the oil is distributed (surface slicks vs. tarballs vs. droplets vs. thick layers vs. thin layers) makes a big difference too: how much of the oil is exposed for abiotic weathering (evaporation, dissolution, UV breakdown), or for biodegradation? UV degradation tends to be an oxidative process, which can make some of the more recalcitrant compounds in oil easier for microbes to metabolize, so, e.g., it's a big deal that the oil being discussed this week is oil that came from the deep plume and never saw the sun. And you could imagine either that a lot of small spills are going to chronically weaken community robustness (whereas a massive one-off spill wouldn't pose a lasting threat to a healthy community), or that occasional massive spills could take even a healthy community and push it to the brink (whereas small, localized spills wouldn't have a lasting impact on the overall community). It's not known, in part because we've never actually managed to establish a baseline by, say, not polluting the Gulf at all for a while.
it was nearly impossible to get a sample of Corexit for analysis; since it's a complex and proprietary mixture
This to me is one of the most shameful side effects of the toxic mix of IP and industrial chemicals. See also fracking solutions, whatever the fuck it was that spilled into the Elk River in West Virginia a short while back. My rights to profit off this thing trump your rights not to be harmed by it.