BP Oil Spill

I read Melissa's blog and it made me think, so I started doing research. I listened to a talk on TED from a marine toxicologist about the oil spill in the gulf. (http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_shaw_the_oil_spill_s_toxic_trade_off.html)

Here is what I learned.

The dispersants that break the oil up into tiny pieces, do so by breaking down lipids. Three points about this.

First point: oil broken down to its tiniest part is still oil, this is just like plastic (like the North Pacific Gyre), and similar to the pesticide DDT (which most Californians and indeed Americans are aware of). In other words they do no break down in to harmless chemicals that can be ignored or forgotten about, but simply break down to smaller versions of the parent chemical, they are chemically identical even if they are microscopic.

Second point: Biomagnification is a process in which animals at the top of the food chain ingest large quantities of chemicals. It starts at the beginning. The ocean's floor belches out nutrients and vital chemicals that drift about the worlds oceans carried by the currents. Microscopic organisms eat, or make use of these nutrients. Floating in this nutrient rich soup is Hazardous Chemical Z, we'll call it Z. Larger microscopic organisms, multicultural ones, eat the single cell ones and some Z, or they are evenly mixed with Z so that the organisms that eat them cannot distinguish between the too. This is the planktivore fishes (sardines and the like) that swim with their mouths open skimming edible microscopic critters in the water and Z. Larger fish eat them and so on and so fourth and the quantity of Z is increased along each link of the food chain. Because sardine eating fish have to eat a lot of sardines which have eaten Z, they get a lot of Z in them, it is magnified. Replace Hazardous Chemical Z with Oil, Plastic, DDT, Mercury, and etcetera and you can understand how chemicals can move up the food chain terminating in lethal quantities for the top predator, which could be us humans.

Third Point: The dispersant that is used by BP to break the oil up (is patent protected as a trade secret, its chemicals are unknown) does so by breaking up lipids, lipids are what our cells are made out of. The gills of fish are destroyed as they breath the water. They die by 'chemical pneumonia' as their gill cells die one by one, decreasing the amount of oxygen being absorbed until they can't any more, they suffocate. Bigger fish eat those fish getting more of the chemical in their bellies which dissolves their insides and so on up the food chain to whales and dolphins, a powerful symbol for nature and all things good with the ocean.

And I now understand documents have been released today that say the coast guard OK'd BP to dump more dispersants than it was supposed to, several hundred thousand tons of it.

If you break up the oil slick on the surface, which we Americans recognize as a powerful symbol of all kinds of things like greed and pollution and etc, you allay the fears of people looking for that slick oil on the surface of the ocean. People think it isn't so bad because there isn't much slick on the surface. That's because the oil is uniformly mixed into the water all the way down to the bottom, down to the coral. And the worst part is we have no idea what this will do, what the long term effect will be.

But as I read in Melissa's blog, a good one by the way, (http://scrapsfromthegooduniverse.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-little-beach-cleanup.html) if you dig down in the sand a few inches you find this slop that has seeped into the sand. How long before that seeps further inland, into the water table say? Will it spread into the ocean, or like Agent Orange will it remain, an industrial strength chemical that does not break down. I guess we will find out.

There is no silver lining.