Gulf of Mexico oil spill was many times the government figures

Researchers from Columbia University (NY, USA) conclude that the amount of oil released daily by BP's Deepwater Horizon well until the first cap was placed on June 15 was 56-68,000 barrels per day, maybe more. This is many times more than the official figures, which evolved from a ridiculous claim of of one thousand barrels to 19,000.

The total oil released to the environment is at least 4.4 million barrels, most of which is still there even if it has been hidden by the use of massive amounts of highly toxic dispersants, in what is the most massive environmental and public health scandal in US history and globally only comparable to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.

Possible variations in the flows from day to day lead to some uncertainty. Additionally, the analysis does not include other smaller plumes from several holes near the broken pipe, holes that are believed to have grown with time.

Lead author, Timothy Crone, developed his technique of optical plume velocimetry to study deep undersea thermal vents in the Pacific Ocean in 2006.

Source: Science Daily.

Reference: Timothy Crone and Maya Tolstoy, Magnitude of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Leak. Science 2010. Pay per view.

Huge underwater "dispersed" oil plume confirmed and other Louisiana catastrophe news

As I have said before, I feel overwhelmed by the amount of information and misinformation around the Louisiana Deepwater Horizon catastrophe and hence I cannot follow it here at Leherensuge with the intensity I would like. I have mentioned also that other more dedicated blogs, such as Washington Blog, Alexander Higgins' Blog and Florida Oil Spill Law, provide a much better and comprehensive critical following of the catastrophe at official and unofficial levels.

But today I must mention some important news. However I am in a hurry, so I apologize in advance for being brief.

Giant oil plume scientifically confirmed at 1 km depth

This is official enough to have made it to the mainstream media. BBC (watch out for a clear pro-BP bias in all British media) and Science Daily report on it, for instance.

The plume is made up of dispersed oil, up to the point that is not easy to see with naked eye. Yet it is there, it is huge and it is not being degraded biologically because water temperature is way too cold.

The news comes from a research paper, published at Science magazine yesterday, by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). However they had to stop their field research short because of bad weather. Therefore the plume has not been fully mapped yet.

This confirms the previous denounce by other scientists about the US administration oil figures being a fairy tale. Most oil is still there and because the use of dispersants (which are still being sprayed and are themselves highly toxic) the oil cannot be cleaned up (nor easily found) at surface nor can be degraded naturally by microorganisms, posing an even worse threat.



Independent expert speaks out

Washington Blog published yesterday an interview with University of California professor Dr. Robert Bea, engineer with ample experience in offshore drilling.

According to him, the good news is that the methane bubble doomsday scenario is most unlikely to be a real risk. All the rest are bad news: the geology is fractured and oil will follow such fractures and possibly leak out to the sea many kilometers from the damaged well. Solving the leak certainly will need relief wells - some previous such incidents have needed as many as five different relief wells.


Seafloor fractures in detail

Alexander Higgins has a great article today on how the macondo well might have fractured the geology of the area and its consequences. It can be synthesized to some extent in this image:


There are many other news, many of great interest, but I seriously recommend you to browse the blogs I mentioned in the first paragraph because I have no room in Leherensuge nor even in my mind for all them.

Very bad looking steady black flow from the Louisiana oil spill spot

Just posted at Florida Oil Spill Law with time stamp of 3:00 am today (local time, I presume):



I am more and more concerned. Well, more like beginning to panic, admittedly. They have no damn idea of what kind of forces they are dealing with and the only thing it seems to matter is profit and/or cutting losses.

Even if the doomsday scenario hypothesis does not become true (and I do not know what to think really), such an uncontrolled flow of oil and methane is a true disaster. It was already the worst oil-related disaster ever but it will be even worse, as it seems it is going to run uncontrolled for months or who knows for how long.

I am in Europe, many many kilometers away... but if you follow NOAA predictions (which only reach to mid-July) the oil has already reached the Atlantic Ocean and will keep flushing in that direction (all that is not skimmed or end ups into beaches and such). Eventually it will reach here too, as the Gulf Stream ends in the Atlantic coasts of Europe. Typically that is a blessing, allowing for several degrees of temperature above what is usual for these northernly latitudes, but now it seems it may become a curse.

Expert who denounced BP found dead

Mathew Simmons, former chairman of Simmons & Co. International, advocate of peak oil theory and heavy critic of BP's management and misinformation on the Louisiana oil disaster was found dead yesterday in the bath tube, allegedly drowned after suffering a heart attack at the age of 67.

Simmons became rather prominent in the last months as he denounced in the media that there must exist another much bigger leak, some five or six miles away from the one reported and seemingly "killed". For him what we could see in the underwater cameras could not account for the real figures of the spill, even when these were minimized by BP and the US government.

More controversially he proposed to tackle the problem using a controlled nuclear explosion.

But crucially he denounced that nothing was being done apparently to quell the main spill, in a most serious case of environmental crime. He also suggested early on that the USA should have taken military control of the problem instead of letting the fox, BP, to take care of the chickens (oil disaster).

Suspicion of assassination is of course widespread through the Internet because the most prominent critical voice on this disaster has been silenced this way. See for instance: Alexander Higgins' Blog, .

In this sense I must mention that the modus operandi, if we are in front of a murder, is very similar to the one used by the Mossad in Dubai some months ago, to murder Hamas member Mamouhd al Mabouh, whose death was for more than a week officially believed to be caused by a heart attack... until French laboratories confirmed the presence of such a high tech poison.

Some 300 videos of Simons' opinions on the oil spill can be found at YouTube.

Update (Aug 12): just to mention that three people working for BP cleanup operations have died. One apparently shot himself, another one died of an apparent heart attack and drowning at a swimming pool (curious coincidence with Matt Simmons' death) and the other is only mentioned by number (source).

Excellent coverage of oil disaster at Washington's Blog

The Louisiana oil catastrophe, with its many aspects (toxic dispersants, ecological and economic impact, BP owners, hidden data and even possible doomsday scenarios), is something I have covered only sparingly. This is partly because it is a main page news issue and partly because I'm truly overwhelmed by the many ramifications of the catastrophe.

However I imagine that many among Leherensuge's readers would appreciate more quality and intensive information about it. I know of two written sources (I don't watch so many visual media, sorry):

One is Global Research and the other and most important one is Washington's Blog. I say most important because many of the materials found at Global Research and elsewhere actually come from this blog and that's how I found it myself. The blog is a general "news and analysis" blog but as of late it has become almost monolithically focused on the Louisiana hecatomb.

I've been trying to add this blog to the blogroll and follow it via Google but it seems to have some strange problems with the feedback link: it works perfectly in Google Reader however. In any case I hope these links are of use to you... because the mainstream media after all is the monopoly of a few oligarchs who simply are not going to put any effort in keeping you properly informed if they can help it.

Ice sheet fragmenting near the North Pole

We still haven't really got out of the deepest solar minimum in a century (solar minimums correlate with colder years) and the Arctic ice sheet is again heading towards the extreme disintegration of 2007, one of the warmest years on record, when the NW passage along the arctic coast of Canada became navigable for the first time ever.

That's what the Italian blog Crisis? What Crisis? has found looking at NASA data (Spanish language version at Rebelión), as it's evident in this image of ice fragmenting at just a little further than 200km from the North Pole:



Which is part of a much larger composite satellite image of the Arctic Sea, where you can see many other cracks as well. The image is dated to June 19th: a month ago.

And something that is also evident in this graph:



It is important to realize that 2007 and 2010 are at the edges of a severe Solar minimum and therefore should not be particularly warm years, rather cold ones. Still the ice sheet is fragmenting like never before. This is of course caused by global warming but also to the accumulative effect produced by it: thinning the ice more and more and reducing the albedo by exposing more water and old bluish ice (we all know that white clothes or walls reduce heating, while black ones increase it). This causes that, while the overall global temperature has only risen by less than one degree Celsius, the change is almost fourfold in the Arctic, which in turn is the cooling central of the planet.

It's a case of positive feedback out of control.

Again this September, most likely, the NW passage will be navigable and we are just beginning the new solar cycle, whose maximum is expected for 2013 (seems it will be a short and mild cycle, or so believes NASA).

But even if the Sun is giving us a hand, the evidence from 2007 and 2010 shows that even with low solar activity and the corresponding relatively "cold" years, the Arctic Sea is melting.

Could Russian subs help close the Louisiana oil leak?

Today seems a day of mystery news that one doesn't really know what to do with them. After mentioning the apparently severe but otherwise unheard of political conflict in Puerto Rico, now I stumble with another strange and rather hidden news item at BBC: the captain of a special high depth Mir submarine claims they could close the Louisiana oil leak but clarifies that top level institutional decisions would be needed.

The two Mir submarines are nowadays searching for methane hydrates (an alternative source of energy) in the depths of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth, and have previously worked in the Arctic. He speaks confident of their capabilities but laments that there seems to be no interest in asking the Russians for help at all.

Puzzling to say the least.

Gulf oil disaster will reach the Atlantic

This is the estimate for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in less than a year, according to simulations by US scientists:

The simulation is based on 5 typical years' climate and does not include any estimate of biological degradation or other accumulation processes such as the formation of tar balls. Whatever the case it is a most worrisome forecast for SE USA, parts of Mexico and even possibly Europe, where the Gulf Stream eventually ends.

The catastrophe, still mostly uncontrolled, has began to be dubbed "the American Chernobyl".

Source: Science Daily.

Sign against the exploitation of Sahrawi waters

The EU is paying Morocco to fish in occupied Western Sahara. You can help by signing this petition, whose text follows (bold type is mine):

Petition:

Stop EU fisheries in Western Sahara!

To the European Commissioner for Fisheries,

No state in the world has recognised the Moroccan annexation of Western Sahara. Still, the EU is paying millions of Euros annually to the Government of Morocco to allow EU vessels to fish in the waters of Western Sahara. The EU fisheries activities in Western Sahara must immediately come to an end.

Morocco continues to refuse to cooperate with the decolonization process in Western Sahara, thereby defying more than 100 UN resolutions that insist on the Saharawi people’s right to self-determination. Simultaneously, Moroccan authorities commit human rights violations against Sahrawis who voice their political views. No EU states, nor the UN, recognise the Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

In this context, cooperating with Morocco in exploiting Western Sahara’s natural resources is highly unethical, and clearly jeopardizes the UN’s efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict.

According to the UN, the natural resources in Western Sahara cannot be exploited without regard to the wishes and interests of the people of the territory. However, the EU is transferring European taxpayers’ money to the Government of Morocco for access to Western Saharan waters, without even consulting the Sahrawi people.

The EU has the legal and moral obligation to stop subverting the UN peace process in Western Sahara, by respecting the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination over their land and their resources.

We urge the European Commission to put an immediate stop to the granting of all licenses to EU vessels fishing in Western Saharan waters, and we demand that no further EU fisheries operations take place in Western Sahara until a peaceful solution to the conflict has been found.

Yours sincerely,

Sign the petition!

The petition was published on 06.11.2009 and has now 10414 signatures.

I would add: pay the taxes to the Arab Sahrawi Democratic Republic and, with their agreement, send that useless NATO navy to ensure the safety of our fishermen and fight against Morocco for the sovereignty of West Sahara.

Brittany's green toxic tide, the horses and the cart

An otherwise innocuous alga has become, thanks to the massive agricultural pollution, in a major threat to the ecosystem, tourism and even lives. The now widespread green toxic tide of sea lettuce remains forms a crust under which a deadly gas, hydrogen sulphide, forms, threatening the lives of those who may dare to walk on it. A horse has already died and its human rider could only barely be saved from the same destiny.

The culprit? Pollution. Nitrogen pollution from the many farms throughout a country that is the major producer by far of pork (60%), poultry (45%) and dairies (30%) in the French Republic. The nitrogen high residues from these farms hyper-fertilize the coastal sea causing overgrowth of these weeds and the subsequent problems that threaten the tourism industry, as well as people's lives and cause a huge cost in the municipalities that desperately try to keep the tide away from their beaches.

More at BBC.

The real problem, I understand, is that these destructive "industries" are being allowed to pollute without paying for their damage. This makes their products "competitive" but the costs are only transferred to Nature and the public.

It is obvious that industrial or agricultural pollution should not be tolerated, certainly not beyond a minimal threshold, and that instead of investing so much public money in ecologically-friendly projects, authorities should be punishing destructive practices instead. This would result in healthier budgets and, of course, environments.

Some would argue that this would make industries less competitive, which only has an answer: eco-protectionism: forbid imports from polluting countries and/or make them pay high taxes. But first we have to clean our home, so we can ask the same from others.

But the opposite practice is what prevails.

Here for decades, we have been paying to electric companies an special "tax" just because they were forbidden to build new nuclear facilities. Logically, they should be the ones paying us for the facilities already built, which cause clear damage to the environment (either by leaks, the ever present danger of an accident and the totally unmanageable residues). Same for the conventional burner facilities.

That would make ecologically friendly electricity to be competitive. But the interest of the monopolistic industry remains, instead of that of the consumers, taxpayers and environment. And nope: electricity is anything but cheap.

What about water? In southern Spain for example, edible water is being misused brutally in golf courses and intensive industrial farming, causing, along with global warming, the rapid desertification of the area. Yet edible water is there a lot cheaper than here, where it rains every other day, and farmers and tourism entrepreneurs still demand more anti-natural water transfers from other hydrographical basins.

Again the interest of the industry and not that of the country (environment, people) is favored. The cart is once and again put before the horses in a never satiated capitalist accumulation process in which the wealth is extracted from Nature and the people into the pockets of a privileged class of vampires.

And I could continue but I have to stop at some point.
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19th century replica iron cargo boat

Built by Itsas Begia, a society from Ziburu (Lapurdi) focused in the preservation and recovery of Basque mariner history, the boat Brokoa arrived yesterday to Zumaia (Gipuzkoa) after several days of coasting from Portugalete (Biscay).

The Brokoa is a replica of 19th century cargo boats, known as txalupa haundi (broad boat), that sailed along the Basque coast carrying prime quality iron ore from the area of Bilbao to the many forges spread through the country (they were built not where lumber was aboundant and rivers could power their machinery, the ore could always be brought from elsewhere).

The ship is 13.7 m long and 3 m wide, with a max. depth of 80 cm, holding two masts 12 and 8 m high. It could carry some 10 tons of material, normally iron but was also common to complement the cargos with other less important merchandises, known as pacotilla (mariner word that now means in common Spanish "fake" or "low quality").

The journey they are now replicating began at the Biscaine port of Portugalete, north of Bilbao, where the original txalupa haundiak used to load the iron from nearby Somorrostro Valley. There the ancestors of the Brokoa were revised by the "ticket-seller major", who made sure that 8 maravedis per iron quintal were paid to the provincial government as taxes. From Portugalete they sailed to Muskiz and Castro Urdiales, where they visited a historical forge in good preservation state. From Castro they sailed to Plentzia, where are the forges of Butron (Gatika) and then to Lekeitio, where steel bars for naval construction used to be made.

And from Leketio, they made it to Zumaia in just three hours. The port of Zumaia used to supply all the industry of Western Gipuzkoa, along the Urola basin. In this locality they visited an old store still preserved.

Today they must have already done their last coastal journey to Donibane Lohitzune (St. Jean-de-Luz) in Lapurdi, also in some 3 hours. From Donibane, the iron used to be carried up the river Urdazubi to Azkaine in Navarre, where the iron ore was stored for its use at the forges of the low Pyrenees, like the one at the Monastery of San Salvador of Urdazubi. In that monastery will the iron end its journey this time too, after an oxen-pulled cart brings it to its destiny like more than a century ago.

Historian Gonzalo Dúo explains that this type of coastal navigation was only made in summertime, when the sea was calm, and always in daylight. It was a way to make some money for people that in winter worked as fishermen in the same kind of ships. They carried as much mineral as they could, sometimes causing the ship's wreckage.

This kind of traffic, he argues, caused much stronger connections between the people of the coast, finding surnames of various local origins, scattered along the Basque coast, something that did not happen in the interior.

In July 2010 the Brokoa will be at the meeting of old ships at Brest (Brittany) and its owners are already planning a longer journey for it along the whole coast of the Bay of Biscay: from the Galician Bayona (at the border with Portugal) to the Basque Baiona (Bayonne) in Lapurdi. Maybe for 2011.

Source: Gara.
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After the storm

Just a quick snap from Plentzia. When an unprecedented storm like this hit your homeland, you cannot just ignore it. Though we did try.

More, often impressive, pics at EITB.
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Global warming de-stabilizing North Atlantic climate

Researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have used coral as direct reference for climatic oscilations within the North Atlantic ocean. The results show that atmospheric global warming does not directly just warm up the ocean but that it rather de-stabilizes it causing much more intense oscilations in its natural tension between the Azores high and Icelandic low pressure nodes. This means that, as global warming increases, both storms and droughts are becoming and will become more extreme and insidious in the affected areas (Europe, Eastern North America, North Africa).

More at Science Daily.
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Oysters: another victim of climatic chaos?

French oysters are dying en masse, specially the young, apparently because of one or two plagues favored by very warm sea temperatures. The phenomenon started a few days ago and has so far affected all factories in France, excepting a small area at Arcachon.

The reason is particularly warm seas this summer but, according to EuroNews, oysters have been colonizing the North Sea in the last decades and are a best indicator of climatic change. Also this summer should not have been so warm anyhow: we are in a Solar minimum, and that implies that, statistically, the weather should be colder - and it is not, not at all.

I just do not want to think what may happen when we reach the Solar maximum circa 2017, specially after reading the recent catastrophic predictions of James Lovelock, who claims that it is just too late to stop climate change and that by 2040 middle Europe, places like Paris or Berlin, will be like the Sahara and that US citizens will have to migrate to Canada.

When Neptune strikes back

In my hometown there is a monument that represents "Man defeating the Sea"

It's a monument to the engineer who designed the canalization of the Firth of Bilbao. In this detail (too large to link directly) you can see that (so typically) the Sea is Neptune, who, with his trident broken and his crown lying on the ground, resists desperately the "epic" human effort to tame him.

Naturally, as someone from the coast, I realize it's largely a myth: that the Ocean cannot be tamed nor defeated and that eventually it always strikes back, dissolving the engineering efforts of those who believe that technology can rule the World.

Yesterday and the day before Neptune stroke back. Maybe just a warning:

In Britain:

In the Basque Country:

Neptune rules. You can't fence the Sea.