Looks like they have found the oil.

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”

The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.

Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.

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goddamn, has it been a whole freaking month???

what depth was this found at? if the prevailing currents carry it south around the keys it'll get hung up in some baddddddddd area's..

Just heard on the news BP wants people to e mail them your ideas on how to stop and clean up the oil!

Sad

That would explain the missing oil for sure.

Looks like the gulf is going to be usless for a couple hundred seasons

Do you guys really think an acoustic switch would have helped? They can not manually activate the BOP with ROV's, an acoustic switch would not have helped.

Top I have heard a few people say that. Then I have heard that they can remotly operate them and if they fail they send down an ROV that has oil or grease in it and it hooks up to a fitting and they pump the valve closed just like when you grease a fitting on your boat. I guess there are a total of three fail safes. At any rate the way I look at it is that they are there for a reason, they certainly would not have hurt and possibly could have saved us a lot of mess.

I think the bottom line is that if they had all known and available fail safes in place and usable, then this would be a horrible accident and it's simply a risk we take by doing any os drilling. But...... by not having these fail-safes in place it puts them in CRIMINAL territory. period. The heads of the company should be charged criminally and serve very long terms

At this point one has to question if ANY fail safes they have thought of will work in deep drilling.

My feelings exactly, although this is several magnitudes greater than 'a lot of mess'.

It's impossible to know exactly what happened or how to prevent this in the future. All the more reason for proceeding with caution in ALL offshore drilling.

I read the other day that BP had modified the BOP as well. Plus, there is the issue of that dead battery. I'll try to find a link and post it later.

Also sounds like business as usual-- those rat ba$tards are are now saying that the operational data records of DeepWater Horizon for the 7 HOURS before the explosion are 'missing'.

the invisible hand strikes again, eh?

effing dickheads. I hope this puts Halliburton out of business.