Bad news on the gulf oil spill. Damages are showing up beneath the surface.

As there has been little good news on the Gulf oil spill disaster, this does not bode well potentially, for years to come. There is plenty of fault to go around but please do not forget how slow the Obama administration was to stepping into this crisis. Eight days passed by before D.C. started to take action. Unlike the Exxon Valdez oil spill, where the size and scope of the spill was well known almost right away, this one was left sleeping by the rocket scientists in the Obama administration until they had no choice but to get involved. BP donated one million dollars to Obama and has been called the most 'environmentally friendly and green' oil company. The spill was not the administration's fault but the slow reaction to it by Obama and his minions has made this his 'Katrina.' Notice how the MSM has been equally as slow or not even criticizing Obama for his tardy response. Quite a contrast to how the MSM thrashed George Bush over Hurricane Katrina.

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Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf
By JUSTIN GILLIS

NYTimes; Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”

The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.

Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
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