UPDATE:
The press release from Goddard Space Flight Center showing sunglints suggesting they are all from the oil slick is wrong. Satellite specialist Dr. Roy Spencer writes in to show me a different MODIS/AQUA image from three days ago that shows clearly where the slick is and is not:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=USA7.2010137.terra.2km
high res 1 km image here
To lend credence to Dr. Spencer’s claim, I searched and found another MODIS/AQUA image that shows a splotch of what looks exactly like what GSFC describes as the “gray-beige colored spill”, except this is all along the west coast of Florida. Clearly it is an optical effect, not an oil spill.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=USA7.2010132.terra.2km.jpg
This suggests then that the GSFC press release has misidentified the optical effect as being the entire Gulf oil spill. The spill is there, as illustrated in the image at top, but it is not the entire “gray-beige colored” area seen in the GSFC press release image. – Anthony
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UPDATE2: Skytruth has a better image which shows the extent, also taken on May 18th, but at much closer zoom level.
Envisat ASAR image, May 18, 2010. Image courtesy CSTARS.
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There is also an overlay showing the sat image with Google Earth, that gives a better idea of scale, after the “Continue reading => ” line.
GSFC Via Eurekalert:
At 3 p.m. EDT on May 18, NASA’s Aqua satellite swept over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill from its vantage point in space and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument captured sunglints in a visible image of the spill.
The visible image showed three bright areas of sunglint within the area of the gray-beige colored spill. Sunglint is a mirror-like reflection of the sun off the water’s surface. In calm waters, the rounded image of the sun would be seen in a satellite image. However, the waves in the Gulf blurred the reflection and created an appearance of three bright areas in a line on the ocean’s surface.
According to the May 18 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) web update of the Deepwater Horizon incident, “satellite imagery on May 17 indicated that the main bulk of the oil is dozens of miles away from the Loop Current, but that a tendril of light oil has been transported down close to the Loop Current.”
The May 18 NOAA update also noted that “NOAA extended the boundaries of the closed fishing area in the Gulf into the northern portion of the loop current as a precautionary measure to ensure seafood from the Gulf will remain safe for consumers. The closed area is now slightly less than 19 percent of the Gulf of Mexico federal waters.”
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Here is a Google Earth overlay view of the area shown in the photo:
Other image sizes available:
Satellite: Aqua – Pixel size: 1km – Alternate pixel size: 500m | 250m
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Dave Springer, May 20, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Your veracity &/or observational skills are now in doubt. Almost the entire U.S. coast, from Chesapeake Bay to Coos Bay, is subject to natural tar ball spots and stains. N. C., the Tar Heel State, got it’s nickname well before offshore petro-development or shipping. On the West Coast, think of a few offshore La Brea Tar Pits oozing over the past 100,000 years.
As to eating seafoods, perhaps your deep knowledge can inform us of precisely what components of bacterial-reduced petroleum are toxic to either fish or us.
Scare and fear do not work. Define the problem.
This story gets worse by the day.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE64J6CF20100520?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a49:g43:r1:c0.571429:b34198026:z0
“Once it reaches full production, the Thunder Hawk platform in Mississippi Canyon Block 734 … deeper water but a similar formation, will pull up to 45,000 bbl/day. So, under comparable conditions, under forced extraction, the best that you can get is about that level. (also a semi-submersible rig) ”
The Thunder Hawk platform will be producing from at least a dozen separate directional wellbores. The leak is from one test bore, partially choked by cement, tubing and damaged BOP rams.
Assuming 25,000 barrels a day at 42 gallons per barrel for 30 days, we get 31,500,000 gallons of oil. There are 6.43 * 10^17 gallons of water in the Gulf, so that means the oil is 4.89 * 10^-10 per cent ( 0.00000000489 per cent) of the volume of the Gulf.
It may be unfortunate that the wellbore is choked by debris.
A well allowed to flow unchoked will often “bridge over”. The lack of back pressure causes the formation to collapse upon itself, naturally plugging the perforations.
That may be why we have never witnessed any massive natural seeps. Natural seeps are many, but individual seeps are low volume events, choked by irregularities in the fault through which they escape. Perhaps natural seeps are less likely today since we have depleted most of the shallow deposits from which natural seeps feed. If so, we should thank the petroleum industry for doing its part in removing this harmful natural pollutant from the environment and disposing of it in a benefical manner.
Regardless, the relief well will inject a mud “clot” into the formation near the perforations and the well will be brought under control in a short time, geologically speaking.
Dave Springer says:
May 20, 2010 at 4:10 pm
I’d like to see all the spill downplayers here volunteer to regularly eat seafood from contaminated waters and have their kids go swimming every day on beaches where tarballs are washing up. Bet I’m as likely to see that as I am the north pole free of ice.
This stuff about a million barrels of oil seeping out naturally every year sounds like a bigger WAG than any figures the climate alarmists put out and even if were true it sure isn’t from a point source in a huge stream that causes oil slicks on the surface. The same amount of raw crude seeping out slowly over millions of square kilometers isn’t comparable to a point source.
That’s how I grew up! U-boat torpedo’s “spilled” nearly 175 million gallons of crude and refined product in 1942 along the mid-Atlantic coast. We always had jars of gasolene to wash the tar off our feet in the 50’s. Everybody ate the sea food. Its interesting that the great fear in 1942 was not the damage to the beaches but the threat of freezing as a result of the heating oil shortages– it why the US built the land based pipeline system.
I don’t know how you could have possibly spent time on the Pacific shores without seeing tar balls. In fact drilling has significantly reduced the large natural tar deposits that washed up on So Cal beaches. Think of the La Brea Tar pits- they were not a spill. The tar balls from So Cal are so prolific they keep washing up in Prince William Sound and get blamed on the Valdez http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es00010a033
Some photos of California tar balls that stayed home http://geology.about.com/od/petroleum/ig/mckittrickseep/
You should also be aware that the tar balls are not tar but asphaltene– the same stuff we use build our roadways . The most toxic fraction of crude oil is the volatiles which escapes to the atmosphere within a day or so. This is about 30 to 40% of the oil volume. It is broken down in the air by photochemical processes. The bacteria, fungi etc chew part of the remaining fraction with the harder to eat stuff ending up as a tar ball. We should be happy that asphaltene is harder to eat or our highways would rot.
You’ll hear a lot of scare stories about poly aromatic hydrocarbons from tar balls but you will also find them from normal street and driveway runoff (as well as cooking residue, mothball etc)
There is an entire reef system that has developed around the asphalt domes off the California coast. http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=7545&tid=282&cid=73106&ct=162 “It was an amazing experience, driving along…and all of a sudden, this mountain is staring you in the face,” said Christopher M. Reddy, director of WHOI’s Coastal Ocean Institute and one of the study’s senior authors, as he described the discovery of the domes using the deep submersible vehicle Alvin. Moreover, the dome was teeming with undersea life. “It was essentially an oasis,” he said, “almost like an artificial reef.” Seems the fish like really big tar balls
If you want to get some good info on the spill and its impacts read the National Academies of Science report Oil in the Sea III. In this report you will see that 60% of all the oil entering No American waters each year are from natural oil seeps or about 47 million gallons a year. About 5000 gallons a day leaks comes from one small seep off Santa Barbara CA.
Mike Davis says:
May 20, 2010 at 10:37 am
“If this had not been man made the same would have happened any way from natural causes! Yes the greatest environmental damage will be from the people trying to stop environmental damage as the cure in this case will be worse than the ill!”
Thanks you for a voice of reason Mike. Lots of people do not realise that an estimated 46% of oil in the oceans/seas is from natural seepage! Thats a vast amount that nature seems to take care of.
Still, It is sad that this accident has taken so many lives and BP are reported as using local people without protective equipment, to clear up the mess seems like another problem that will be addressed by the only people to benefit from this……….Lawyers!
I’d like to see all the spill downplayers here volunteer to regularly eat seafood from contaminated waters and have their kids go swimming every day on beaches where tarballs are washing up.
Been there, done that. I used to swim in the ocean, south off the LI beaches. The daily after-swim routine was to rinse your feet, go into Grandma’s room to get the lighter fluid and clean the inevitable (large) tar balls off both your feet.
We used to eat fish out of the bay to the north all the time (and swim in it). It was quite polluted by today’s standards.
We were all much healthier and fitter for it.
Steve Huntwork says: (May 20, 2010 at 10:41 am) Observations of Benjamin Franklin
Thanks, Steve! Fascinating and absorbing.
L Nettles says:
quote In the early days of Climate Audit there was a commenter who’s pet theory was that the cooling in the 40′s was due to all the oil spilled as a result of submarine war. Wonder if we will hear from him again. unquote
Whoever he was he got it 100% wrong: if you look at the Hadcrut graphs before the Folland and Parker bucket ‘correction’ is applied (see CA for the story and validity of the correction) then the warming from 39 to 45 is very plain.
Tom Wigley was puzzled by this WWII warming — Google the UEA emails for Wigley and blip to see his comment.
Is the cloud cover over the sheened areas behaving normally? What’s happening to the albedo?
JF
Oh, yes, re natural seeps. I’ve heard that there is a superstition in the industry that areas with lots of prawns are good to drill.
Re: Dave Worley – May 20, 2010 at 6:59 pm
“The Thunder Hawk platform will be producing from at least a dozen separate directional wellbores. The leak is from one test bore, partially choked by cement, tubing and damaged BOP rams.”
I stand corrected.
In reality , I had known about the numerous feeds when I read about it about a year or so ago. Your pointing out that it is actually a multiple feed system sort of highlights the point I was trying to make. Thanks.
For the “why don’t you eat the seafood” comment from earlier. I do when I can. I live in Florida. Spanish and King Mackerel are some of the best eats around. You can keep your Redfish. Since they are a wide ranging fish, their population might be affected though.
brodie says:
May 20, 2010 at 4:53 pm
To all US BP employees:
Interesting. But the public isn’t receptive to any stinkin’ facts right now. I think BP’s biggest error to date was Hayward’s comment reported earlier today that suggested the impacts wouldn’t be as horrendous as the media was suggesting. Not that that was not true (I hope). It just wasn’t the best thing to say PR wise right now. Perception counts more than reality, particularly when the media has the public whipped up into a frenzy and the Obamites are trying to blame BP for everything possible right now – so the public doesn’t look any closer at them while they attempt to use this for political advantage.
Hayward should have played along with the panic for the time being. That would have avoided a lot of flak plus anything less than an oily apocalypse will look even better.
The truth, or something closer, can come out later, after the mob mentality calms down.
In the meantime, I sure hope that the shoreline damage is as minimal as possible.
The spill is of course a disaster for everybody concerned, was avoidable and wouldn’t have happened in European waters. Don’t forget though that BP aren’t drilling for oil in deep water for fun, it is to satisfy our insatiable demand for energy and I include in “we” the very greenest. The point of this article, I believe, isn’t downplaying the seriousness of the spill but to counter the resultant alarmist howling.
Near where I live is the largest oil spill in the world. It is estimated at around 2 TRILLION barrels. It’s all soaked into the ground, and both flora and fauna don’t grow properly in that area. If you fly over, you can CLEARLY see the oil sheens in lakes and rivers.
We are doing our level best to clean up this massive spill. Every day, hundreds of huge loaders pile the contaminated soil and sand into trucks, and it gets a steam bath to liberate the petroleum. Cleaned sand and soil is returned and the completed areas are a boon to local wildlife. It’s a huge job that will likely take over a century to complete. Luckily, the extracted petroleum can be sold to offset the cost of cleanup.
Unfortunately, the same people who are wetting their panties about the spill in the Gulf are doing their best to stop us from cleaning up this mess. For some strange reason, they feel that we have to live with this massive spill in the middle of our region, stinking it up, polluting groundwater, rivers and streams, and stunting forest growth.
Please, write your elected representatives and ask, no Demand, if necessary, BEG them to support our cleanup efforts at Athabasca. Don’t just do it for Alberta, do it for the CHILDREN. Your children. So they too can know the joy of filling a car with pure, clean, natural Gasoline, while simultaneously providing plant fertilizer for our crops.
“BEG them to support our cleanup efforts at Athabasca.”
ha haha, hilarious !!!
CodeTech: May 21, 2010 at 12:24 am
We are doing our level best to clean up this massive spill.
Quick — mobilize PETA! Save the threatened Albertan kitties!
Reality check time. Like all events there are consequences. Yes this spill will cause problems and yes we will fix them. The reality is that 30% of the United States Oil comes from this ares and another 20% comes from Canada. (oil sands) Both these areas are detested by the anti oil crowd. Mind you after this they may choose to protest in the Warm Southern U.S. instead of Mosquito infested marshes of Northern Alberta. Back to the reality if we shut down both these places then you remove 50% of the oil from the U.S. economy.
This is why the U.S. Government is so quiet about all this. They may be wannabe Euro crates but they are not stupid. This event has shown them for who they are and they are scared to death. They know that thy can not shut off the oil or the economy will collapse like Spain.
So they will stop the leak clean up and continue on because if they do not then the economy will tank especially in the area where this event is happing.
The proof is in the pudding. If green energy really worked this would be the perfect time to push it. Since green energy does not work, – if it did we would be using it – they are standing naked in the room with no where to hide.
No body likes this just like nobody likes Volcano or tsunami but we will survive clean up and move on.
Taking pictures of this
oil disaster will
now get you be arrested
for spreading fear–
bama says
BP dissent is NOT permitted–
But AGW dissent is Permitted–
http://margotsweb.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/bp-and-coast-guard-threaten-to-arrest-journalists-for-covering-oil-polluted-shoreline-in-louisiana/
http://margotsweb.wordpress.com
Spin it, trolls.
Lovely. A day at the beach followed by scrubbing tar off yourself with gasoline. Who wouldn’t mind that?
The larger point made accidentally is that a decade after the u-boat sinkings ended the tar was still washing up on the beaches enough that it was routine to need to scrub it off yourself with a highly volatile solvent after a day at the beach.
At least one group stands to benefit – an army of lawyers on both sides in class action litigation. I was sympathetic with the tobacco industry as smokers had to be illiterate morons to be unaware of the risk they were voluntarily undertaking every time they lit up. I’m not at all inclined to feel sorry for BP.
Here’s something that might effect the AGW scene. It appears the Obama administration may be trying to cover up the extent of the spill in cahoots with BP. The scientific community is starting to raise hell about it. When the New York Times and the Huffington Post turn against Obama his source of political capital has run dry.
Scientists Fault Lack of Studies Over Gulf Oil Spill
Maybe some good will come of this. It might end the one-sided love affair between the Obama adminstration and the scientific community. They see him as a heroic supporter and he sees them as useful idiots. A wake-up call might be in the offing.
As long as we’re on the subject of energy supply… I agree that we are married to offshore drilling for the nonce. That doesn’t mean it can’t be made safer against a repeat of this unfolding disaster.
In any case there’s a limited supply of economically recoverable oil. Most people don’t realize what “economically recoverable” means. As the easy-to-access light sweet crude is used up (already well beyond peak production of it) we have to go after stuff that’s more costly to recover and/or most costly to refine. There comes a point where it takes more energy to recover and refine the oil than the energy you get from the end product. Recovery stops sometime before that point.
As another commenter pointed out, green energy isn’t viable. At least not from solar collectors, windmills, and stuff like that. Marginal sources at best. Nuclear fission power plants, while probably economically viable, are politically dead due to the Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) syndrome, proliferation issues, and whatnot. Fusion power seems as far away from practicality as ever. If we could get a space elevator operational, a bit of hope there if current pace of improvement in carbon nanotube cable continues like it has been, we could boost enough mass into orbit cheaply enough to make solar power sats beaming electricity down as microwaves to decentralized rectenna farms viable. Still a trillion dollar capital outlay but it would provide all the cheap energy needed for the foreseeable future and pay for itself in very short order. It would still take decades to build out though.
What I’m really hoping comes about pretty quickly was just in the news recently – Craig Venter’s continuing success with artificial life. If we can get to the point where we can program bacteria to do things they’re already capable of by mixing and matching genes from different species and directing them like armies of automatons doing our bidding then the energy problem, and a host of other problems, is solved in short order. I believe we’re quickly approaching the point where design of custom bacteria on an engineering workstation is a reality.
Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA
I’ve been closely following this since 1987 after reading the seminal work in nanotechnology hot off the press Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler. Progress has been unfolding more or less precisely as he outlined 23 years ago well within the estimated time frames. The most important milestone, that of putting a harness on the nanometer scale factories (bacteria) that have been waiting around on a silver platter ready for exploitation for billions of years, seems to be getting pretty close now. Venter is leading the way more than anyone else IMO from constructing a viable bacterial genome from mail-order DNA snippets to circumnavigating the globe creating a gene library from shotgun sequencing of microrganisms sampled in the ocean depths. For any engineers here, once you understand the possibilities of being able to create self-replicating nanometer scale factories to do your bidding, there’s nothing comparable in history to the opportunities it opens up. Fire, agriculture, metallurgy, and electronics pale in comparison – mere stepping stones to the signal technology.
“of course you must have the ability to empathize with animals”
Yeah, liberals are good at empathizing with animals, not so good at empathizing with humans though.
Release the Tesla technology! We need to demand from the government the release of Teslas free energy technology. We have been kept on petrolium based energy for decades when it’s obsolete. We could have been off all oil many years ago if the government and big oil didn’t supress Teslas discovery.
We must all scream togethter. RELEASE THE TESLA TECHNOLOGY!
When is the last time you heard a liberal say there are too many people?
When is the last time you heard a liberal say there are too many animals? Unless, of course, those animals are used primarily to feed people.
Dave Springer says:
May 21, 2010 at 7:46 am
Lovely. A day at the beach followed by scrubbing tar off yourself with gasoline. Who wouldn’t mind that?
The reason the tar continued for a decade or more is the oil continued to be released from the holds of the sunken ships. Very different from this spill. No we were not happy about the tar – in fact we didn’t think much about it at all. Given a choice between swimming and tar we chose swimming. Tar balls are a fact of life in So Cal and the Gulf with or without drilling. You asked a question about whether or not people would swim in the water and eat the sea food and you have received two yes answers. You really need to dig a little deeper into how commonplace asphaltene is in our everyday environment. As an aside the Indians of southern Texas used to chew tar balls.
A 50 year health study on 22,000 crude oil workers (the people covered daily head to toe in oil) found their health histories were as good or better than the general population.http://journals.lww.com/joem/Abstract/2001/04000/An_Updated_Mortality_Study_of_Workers_at_a.17.aspx
Don’t take these comments as being uncaring or unconcerned. My concern with this spill is that the media induced hysteria is going to cause political feel good responses that will do more damage than the oil. (Aggressive marsh cleanup can more than double the recovery time compared to allowing nature to take its course). And the media hysteria has and continues to hurt the tourist related businesses on the Gulf.
Read the Nat. Acad report. The greatest environmental damage is done by catastrophic nearshore releases of oil from a super tanker. The lowest long term threat is drilling near refineries such as the Gulf. The fact that few people remember the Ixtoc blowout in 1979 in the Gulf (bigger than this one and 9 months in duration) but remember the Vadez makes my point. Remember 30 to 40% of the oil is volatile and in offshore wells it does not not make it to the coast before evaporation.
My concern is that the media sells oil as the greatest threat to the Gulf ecosystem. A spill’s impact in the Gulf runs from several months to maybe 3 years. Plenty of papers to show this. However the impacts of shrimping, wetland loss and the disruption of the sediment budget are far more serious and long lasting to the health of the Gulf. If you really want to be outraged at environmental damage read up on the near shore impacts of the shrimp fishery subsidized with your tax dollars.