The big news on the Gulf oil spill now is where has all the oil gone? The size of the slick has shrunk tremendously and it has a lot of folks, including Government officials and tree huggers, wondering where the oil has gone. Some say it has sank to the ocean’s floor and is sitting just under the silt, other say it has been taken away by the Gulf stream and still others say it has all washed up into the marshes. There are even those who say that the oil is sitting in the water column, somewhere between the surface and the bottom. But preliminary results tend to show that perhaps Nature is cleaning up the Gulf oil spill.
The most logical explanation (backed up with scientific data) though is that nature itself is taking care of the oil that didn’t wash up on the beaches or the marshes. The stuff that stayed out in the Gulf is believed by many biologist to have been devoured by those nefarious microbes and fungi. They also predict about 40 percent has evaporated.
Those of us who’ve worked in the oil industry have long been told that there are microbes and fungi that feed on crude oil. Which kinda makes sense when you stop to think that oil is nothing more than rotted organic matter. The Gulf has always leaked oil from the ocean bed and these little microbes were more and happy to gobble it up. They even multiply at a fast rate in the warm ocean water. This could be on explanation why so much has disappeared at a faster rate than it did in Alaska after the Valdez oil spill. (and hey, did you ever hear the rumor that the oil in that tanker was really BP oil and not Exxon oil?)
If this is truly what’s happening, it should come as a surprise to anyone. But unfortunately many of us don’t tend to think well when we see oil covered birds and mammals being taken in to be cleaned up, or the dead ones discarded.We start thinking with our hearts instead of our heads. I know I was pretty PO’ed at BP every time I watched TV.
Now I’m not saying that we should forget what happened here. It’s my belief that this will affect the Gulf for many years. But I don’t think it’s going to be near as bad as some environmentalist want us to think it will be. Nature has a way of taking care of herself. It may not be pretty, but there are few natural things that nature makes that it can’t fix. We tend to forget that crude oil is a product that is created naturally.
I also do not think that BP acted properly. I think they were negligent in many ways and I think they should pay. But let’s not write off the Gulf Coast for crisis surviving just yet. The best estimates is that the clean up crews and skimmers out in the Gulf have only grabbed about 1 to 2 percent of the oil. While most people who follow these things know this is pretty much peeing into a hard wind, I tend to think that it makes us all feel a little warm and fuzzy seeing people scooping up tar balls on beaches.
Deep down we know it’s doing very little, if any, good at all. But we want to know there’s an effort somewhere.We want to see those guys standing around in White suits, blue gloves and Yellow hardhats holding trash bags!
Nature has a big ole history of righting wrongs. Look at Mount St. Helens. When she blew her top, there were scientist predicting that it would be the end of times. Heck, a lot of them had humanity’s grave dug and casket nailed shut. But an odd thing happened on the way to humanity’s funeral. Nothing! Sure, there was some ash on some farm ground and some fell into lakes and rivers, but a majority of it went into the air streams and was dispersed around the world.
Kinda like the same thing that has happened over in Iceland and that little ash puffing pimple-on-the-earth they have. Other than PO’ing some flyers, it’s really not done much to the environment.
Not to mention previous oil spills that fizzled out after awhile leaving people to wonder what happened to the oil.
No, I think we should be concerned about the Gulf Coast, but I think our attention should be on the Politics of the whole matter. You have Hussein Obama trying to put a moretorium on drilling and telling us that deep water drilling is bad, all the while funneling 2 billion to a Brazilian oil company so they can drill where…in deep water. Water much deep than the Horizon was in.
I’m way more fearful of man made disasters than anything mother nature can throw at me. We can deal with tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes pretty well, it’s those darn economic collapses and over extended Government powers that I truly worry about.
While nature may be able to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf, it can’t touch some of these man made disasters. We have to clean up that crap ourselves!
