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Gulf Coast Oil Spill
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KLMNO
Gulf oil spill adds to the complexity of a deep-sea world
gulf from A1
“Everybody fixates on the pic- ture of the cormorant or the bird flailing around all covered with oil, and while that’s obviously sad to see, no one should assume there’s not similar things occur- ring in the open ocean,” said An- dy Bowen, an oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic In- stitution in Massachusetts. “It’s not like the open ocean is irrel- evant.” More is known about the sur- face of the moon than about the world at the bottom of the sea. Scientists long ago clung to the “azoic hypothesis” about the deep — the presumption that nothing could possibly be alive so far from the photosynthetic world. Gradually that belief suc-
cumbed to living proof to the contrary. Life finds a way. Instead of photosynthesis, there is che- mosynthesis. Organic matter rains into the depths from higher in the water column. Oil itself is a part of this mysterious universe, leaking naturally from the sea- floor. It is testament to life’s inge- nuity that for some bacteria, oil is
food. The broken well is 5,000 feet below the surface, on the conti- nental slope, which is the long hill that runs from the edge of the continental shelf to the abyssal plain in the central gulf. The pressure is about 2,230 pounds per square inch, 152 times that of the atmosphere at sea level. The temperature is just a few degrees above freezing. But the Deepwater Horizon well is in an area that is compara- tively well explored. Scientists have been actively studying the deep coral reefs of the gulf, in many cases venturing personally in submersible vessels that can withstand the crushing depths. This strange realm can be disori- enting. “It’s sort of like being in the
Grand Canyon with the lights out and in a snowstorm,” Bowen said. The topography is full of knolls, hills, canyons — the leak- ing well is located in Mississippi Canyon Block 252 — and the sea bottom is not simply mud. “You can go one place and it would be like quicksand. You can move over another ways, and it would be as hard as a sidewalk,”
What lies beneath
A vibrant ecosystem thrives on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and scientists are not quite sure what the effects of the oil spill — and the oil dispersants — will be to the creatures encountering it up close.
Mississippi Delta
LA. New Orleans MISS. Biloxi Pensacola
Gulf of Mexico
0 MILES 50
DETAIL
Spill’s extent on May 14
Continental shelf
100 mi
Wellhead site
7,500 ft*
*Vertical scale exaggerated
Some common deep-water species
Accident site
2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 7,000
13,500
Temperature 30° 50° 70°
ALA. Mobile FLA.
1,000 0ft.
SUNDAY, MAY 16, 2010
Under the Gulf of Mexico
150 feet
Most scuba divers stay above this depth.
330 feet
Sunlight rarely reaches beyond this depth in the gulf. No plants grow below here.
660 feet
The continental shelf yields to the continental slope, which descends steadily to ultra-deep ocean.
5,023 feet
Depth of seafloor at the wellhead site.
13,500 feet
Approximate depth of gulf at its deepest.
Sharks: Rays and sharks patrol the water column, and it is not unusual to find them at great depths.
Sea corals:
Colonies in 6-foot- tall, bushlike formations house many of the rest of the animals.
Deep-sea red
crab: Larger than blue crabs and smaller than king crabs, these are edible by humans.
SOURCES: Thomas Shirley, marine biologist at Harte Research Institute; NOAA
Sea stars: They
have no brain and pump seawater instead of blood through their bodies.
Isopods: These scavengers look like their land-dwelling pillbug cousins, except that they grow to three feet long.
Clams: Dense beds of these mollusks feed solely on methane-eating bacteria.
Polychaetes: There are 604 species of deep-sea worms living in the vicinity of the oil spill.
BY BONNIE BERKOWITZ AND ALBERTO CUADRA /THE WASHINGTON POST
said Rich Camilli, an oceanogra- pher at Woods Hole who in 2006 made a series of dives to the gulf floor eight miles northwest of the blown-out well. His journey about 3,000 feet below the sur- face took place right after an earthquake. “It looked like all hell had bro-
ken loose on the seafloor,” Camil- li said.
Embedded in the mud are
structures made of methane hy- drates, the slushy ice that forms when pressurized gas mixes with very cold water at depth. These are the hydrates that accumulat- ed inside a huge steel contain- ment dome that had been low- ered over the major leak from a collapsed pipe. Because of the hy- drates, BP engineers had to aban- don that strategy for capturing the leaking oil.
When Camilli observed hy- drates after the earthquake, they
“had broken away from the sea- floor and had floated up and away. They’re buoyant. One site, called Sleeping Dragon, a mas- sive hydrate block was working its way out of the seafloor — about the size of a school bus. There were pockmarks where the hydrates come out of the sea floor.” This region of the gulf is fertil- ized by organic matter from the Mississippi River. It is rich in plankton and other organisms. The result is what is called ma- rine snow, which is easily seen in the brief snippets of video re- leased by BP that show the leak- ing pipe. “There’s this particulate mat-
ter that’s falling like rain, or like snow, through the ocean, all the way from the surface to the bot- tom,” said Peter Etnoyer, a ma- rine biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad-
ministration. “There’s thousands of creatures in the water column. As you descend though the water column, you’ll see many biolumi- nescent plankton.” The depths of the gulf are also
a potential answer to a question that has been in the air for weeks now: Where, exactly, has all the oil gone? A partial explanation is that the slick has been bombed with more than half a million gal- lons of the chemical dispersant Corexit 9500, made by Nalco. More dispersants have been ap- plied at depth, directly on the main leak. Much of the oil sinks to the bottom.
“If you apply the dispersants to the source of the oil down there, you are completely hiding the problem,” said Kert Davies, re- search director for Greenpeace. “It looks like it’s gone away, but there is no ‘away’ in the ocean. It’s like sweeping it under the
rug.”
Shirley, the marine biologist, notes that oil is not a foreign sub- stance in the gulf: “What most people haven’t considered is that there’s 48 million gallons of oil that’s leaked naturally in the gulf every year.” Ian MacDonald, the Florida
State University professor who has gained attention with his es- timate, based on aerial images, that the leak is five times the offi- cial estimate of 5,000 barrels a day, said nature will ultimately have to fix the gulf mess. “BP is not going to clean up this spill,” he said. “The Coast Guard is not going to clean up this spill. What’s going to clean up this spill is the physical, chemical, biologi- cal process of the good ol’, poor, downtrodden Gulf of Mexico.” Life is an active and improvisa- tional agent in the deep water. Corals have found purchase on dozens of ships sunk in the gulf in 1942 when Nazi U-boats pa- trolled the shipping lanes. Scien- tists study the doomed vessels to get a better idea of coral growth rates at depth. Less than a mile from the un- capped well, now upside down, is the hulk of the Deepwater Hori- zon rig. It is now, in effect, an ar- tificial reef, destined to become another garden of the deep.
achenbachj@washpost.com
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BP fails in its latest attempt to contain oil
by Joel Achenbach and Juliet Eilperin
An attempt to use a mile-long tube to capture most of the oil gushing from a well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico failed on the first try, but technicians were working Saturday night to put the pipe in place, BP officials said. The “riser insertion”
tactic,
which gained support from BP engineers only in recent days, is akin to inserting one straw into another straw. The goal is to con- tain the oil in the main riser pipe before it reaches open water, where natural gas quickly com- bines with the water to form slushy methane hydrates that have complicated previous at- tempts to contain the leak. But the effort ran into mechan- ical trouble on the first stab, BP chief operating officer Doug Sut- tles said. Giving few details, he said there was a problem con- necting a 5,000-foot string of pipe to the “tool” being inserted into the damaged pipe. The tool was retrieved by a surface ship and an adjustment was made, Suttles said. Meanwhile, the Associated
Press reported that another BP oil rig, the Atlantis, has operated in the gulf with incomplete and inaccurate engineering docu- ments, a deficiency that prompt- ed one BP official to warn could “lead to catastrophic operator er- ror.” The allegations, made by a whistleblower, were “substantiat- ed” in a report by an independent firm hired by BP. Also Saturday, BP resumed the
spraying at depth of chemical dis- persants, which break the oil into smaller pieces.
achenbachj@washpost.com eilperinj@washpost.com
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