Its an out and out lie I tell ya. Its outrageous. How stupid do they think we are? And I know whose behind it....that Muslim president of ours who was born in Kenya and who plays golf all day.
Study: Petroleum-eating microbes significantly reduced gulf oil plume
By David Brown
Tuesday, August 24, 2010; 1:44 PM
The Gulf of Mexico ecosystem was ready and waiting for something like the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and seems to have made the most of it, a new scientific study suggests.
Petroleum-eating bacteria - which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the sea floor - proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.
The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing the amount of oil in the undersea "plume" by half about every three days, according to research published online Tuesday by the journal Science.
The findings, by a team of scientists led by Terry C. Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laborator, in California, help explain one of the biggest mysteries of the disaster - where has all the oil gone?
"What we know about the degradation rates fits with what we are seeing in the last three weeks," Hazen said. "We've gone out to the sites and we don't find any oil but we do find the bacteria."
The findings point to a different conclusion from that drawn by many readers of a study published last week, also in the journal Science. That research, by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute found no reduction in the oxygen content of the gigantic oil plume, suggesting that microbes were consuming the oil very slowly.
The study published Tuesday also suggests indirectly that dispersants used to break the wellhead stream of oil into a mass of sub-microscopic particles may have speeded the cleanup. By increasing the surface area between oil and water, the dispersants seem to have provided the deep-sea microbes greater access to this unusual food source.
Some of the spill's 206 million gallons of oil has come ashore, some has sunk into bottom sediments, and a little is still a floating froth. But the mile-wide, 650-foot high cloud of oil that drifted for months 4,000 feet below the surface underwater seems to have disappeared in the six weeks since the well was plugged.
The plume's whereabouts has been a contentious matter.
In the Woods Hole study published last week, scientists described finding an undersea oil cloud on June 23 to 27 similar to the one Hazen and his colleagues found between May 25 and June 2 - which was similar to one found soon after by people from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
read more............
washingtonpost.com |
