Man wakes up to oil damage

Gulf oil spill impact remains a mystery

Paul Montagna, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi who studies the coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico, explained that the underwater impacts of the spill are likely to be much greater than what has appeared on the surface, itself a slick the size of the state of Delaware.

“There is now a great deal of concern that oil is moving up and down the entire water column in and around important ecological areas,” Montagna told the World Socialist Web Site. "To the northwest is the Pinnacle reef complex, and to the east is the Esoto canyon. These are very rich breeding grounds for a large number of marine species."

Montagna pointed out that the behavior of the oil under deep water conditions is likely to be very different than on the surface. In particular, it is unlikely the oil will break down as it does when it is exposed to the heat and light of surface conditions. "It’s a cold, high pressure environment, which should act to preserve the oil," Montagna said. "I think of my refrigerator. I put my fruit in the cold so it won’t spoil."

Scientists also warn that the underwater oil will remove large amounts of oxygen from the water, effectively suffocating parts of the sea. The removal of oxygen from the sea by microbes that feed on the oil will threaten coral reefs as far away as the Florida Keys. Reefs, some of which are hundreds of feet beneath the surface, providing critical habitat for numerous species, including blue fin tuna and the endangered sperm whale.
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Dr. George F. Crozier, a marine biologist and the head of Alabama’s Dauphin Island Sea Lab, told the WSWS that he believes the first species to suffer from the oil plumes will be the simplest life forms in the sea. "Within two or three years, the microbial community can degrade that oil," he said. "But like us, they use oxygen to eat, putting carbon into the water that can cause other forms of life to asphyxiate. Some of the bigger forms of sea life will avoid the plumes, but the very bottom of the food chain, like plankton, could be wiped out in whole layers of the sea." Damage to the lower life forms will work its way up the food chain, Crozier said.

There is also the question of what becomes of crude oil’s toxicity in deep sea conditions. Crozier said that two weeks ago he asked BP an important question. "If much of the spill is under the water, and not on the surface, where is the toxicity?" he asked. "They still have not explained that."
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A number of scientists have warned that both the massive size of the spill—very likely tens of millions of gallons—and its location close to the Gulf loop current make it likely that it will move far beyond its current location.

"All the water moving into the Gulf of Mexico passes through between Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula and Cuba, charting a course northward toward the Gulf Coast," Crozier said. "At a certain point it encounters the continental watershed coming from the Mississippi and Mobile Bay. It turns right—currents in the northern hemisphere tend to turn right—and passes out of the Gulf between Florida and Cuba. Here it becomes the Gulf Stream, and goes up the Atlantic Seaboard."
WSWS

Canada’s tar sands oil damage could be bad as Gulf’s

As the oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico destroys habitat and livelihoods, the extraction of oil from Canadian oil sands deposits is having a similar impact on fragile ecosystems and communities deep in the North American interior.

The dramatic impact of oil sands expansion should give the companies involved and their investors pause, cautions a new report commissioned by Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmental groups, and authored by the financial risk management group RiskMetrics.

Oil sands development is "kind of like the gulf spill but playing out in slow motion", said report co-author Doug Cogan, director of climate risk management at RiskMetrics. He called it a "land-based" version of the gulf disaster.

The value in the oil sands is bitumen, a thick, heavy form of petroleum with a tar-like consistency that requires energy-intensive processing to separate it from clay and sand. The bitumen is not drilled for but mined, and that mining has led to the razing of boreal forests and fouling of water supplies in parts of the 140,000 square kilometres of Alberta in which the oil sands are found.

Cogan drew the connection between the huge amount of seawater being polluted in the Gulf of Mexico and the huge amount of freshwater that is polluted in the course of extracting oil from the oil sands.
IPS

Natural disasters altered history often

Humans may owe their place on the planet to a mass extinction of fish 360 million years ago, it was claimed.

The cataclysmic event reset the evolutionary starting point for all vertebrates living today, said US scientists.

If it had not occurred, humans and their ancestors may not have evolved - or could have evolved very differently.

Key features shared by all modern mammals, birds and reptiles - such as five-digit limbs - originated when life re-emerged after the mass extinction, the experts believe.

"Everything was hit, the extinction was global," said researcher Lauren Sallan from the University of Chicago. "It reset vertebrate diversity in every single environment, both freshwater and marine, and created a completely different world." The Devonian Period, which stretched from 416 to 359 million years ago, is also known as the Age of Fishes.

A broad array of species filled the oceans, rivers and lakes, but most were unlike any alive today.

Armoured placoderms, such as monstrous 30-foot carnivore Dunkeosteus, and lobe-finned fishes similar to modern lungfish dominated the waters. Ray-finned fishes, sharks and four-limbed tetrapods were in the minority.

But the picture changed abruptly with the traumatic Hangenberg extinction.

"There's some sort of pinch at the end of the Devonian," said Professor Michael Coates, from the University of Chicago. "It's as if the roles persist, but the players change: the cast is transformed dramatically.

"Something happened that almost wiped the slate clean and, of the few stragglers that made it through, a handful then re-radiate spectacularly."

New fossil finds and analytical techniques brought to light the full impact of the Hangenberg event, said the scientists. The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

What happened to trigger the mass extinction remains an unsolved mystery.
The Independent/UK