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.

Upper Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic vegetation and climate of NW Iberia

Just a brief mention of an important palaeoclimatic paper (in Spanish language):

Pablo Ramil Rego, Cambio climático y dinámica del paisaje en Galicia (Climate change and environmental dynamics in Galicia). Recursos Rurais, 2009. (Direct PDF link).

Most informative is maybe figure 12, that I reproduce here:

Click to expand

It is pretty evident that in the Last Glacial Maximum (first map), the region was dominated by grass and mountain dwarf shrubs, but with importance of forest in the south (Northern Portugal) and even in Asturias (something I was not clearly aware of and that should be general for all the Cantabrian strip).

Forests gradually expanded in the Late Upper Paleolithic, as climate warmed gradually, becoming clearly dominant in the Epipaleolithic (last map), when climate was already pretty much like today's. Epipaleolithic would anyhow last for some three millennia after the period covered here.

Later deforestation is apparent (fig. 15) but mild at some locations since c. 5000 calBP (beginnings of Neolithic), in the Iron Age, but specially since the Roman and Medieval periods.

Found at Arquêociencias[por].

More on megafauna and humans: Iberian peninsula

There is an interesting article at Science Daily today that adds important information for one of the discussions that have arisen in Leherensuge recently: did humans caused megafauna extinctions?

The answer is clearly no. Not directly at least. Woolly mammoths are known to have existed in the Iberian peninsula, specially but not only in the North, not just in the Neanderthal (Middle Paleolithic) period but specially in the Upper Paleolithic period, when modern humans were already established and thriving in the region.

These species lived alongside different human cultures. There is evidence in some sites of the Basque country, Navarra and Catalonia that the Neanderthals coexisted with the mammoths and the reindeer at specific times. However, the majority of evidence of these faunae coincides with the periods of the Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian cultures.

The most important detail for me is the word Magdalenian. We know with some certainty that population grew quickly in the Magdalenian period, after the Last Glacial Maximum, yet megafauna was still there and seems rather abundant.

The key element for the vanishing of these large herbivores in Iberia was the end of the Ice Age, when forests became the dominant feature of a warmed up landscape in which these animals, adapted to cold and steppe, could not survive.

There is however an ill-understood gap in the 31-26 Ka period (Aurignacian period, which in Iberia lasts from c. 30 Ka to c. 22 Ka. BP uncalibrated), when the megafauna findings are lacking.

Ref. Diego J. Álvarez-Lao and Nuria García, Chronological distribution of Pleistocene cold-adapted large mammal faunas in the Iberian Peninsula. Quaternary International, 2010. Pay per view.

UN whitewashes the ecocide and genocide of Shell in Niger Delta

If BP is insulting and harming the US people and clearly manipulating the US government, go figure what can happen in a much poorer country like Nigeria!

But what about the United Nations? It seems that Royal Dutch Shell, the second largest company of the world and one with a very murky past (specially remembered for its support of the Apartheid regime in South Africa), is also perfectly able to buy its favors.

This is what Black Agenda Report denounced a few days ago: that the study by the UN Environmental Program, paid by Shell, blames locals and the guerrilla for 90% of polution and spills in the Delta Region, once known as Biafra. However it seems that it has backtracked and claims now that no official report is due until next year.

Whatever the case the situation in the Niger Delta, denounced by AI, may be even worse than that of the Gulf of Mexico, at least in many aspects.


The true scope of Niger River Delta pollution is catastrophic, with the equivalent of 9 to 13 million barrels of oil fouling the waterways, farmlands and mangrove forests of Africa's largest wetland. That's at least twice as much oil as escaped in the recent Gulf of Mexico disaster, thus ranking Nigeria and Shell as the number one oil polluters in the world (Glenn Ford at Black Agenda Report).

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).

Louisiana oil disaster: the more I read/watch, the more pessimistic I am

In theory they have capped it and that's about it. In practice it is extremely worrisome that they are systematically falsifying, hiding, photoshopping the truth.

Like this bubbling methane seep captured yesterday by one of BP ROVs but hidden by something as simple as darkening the image:



It's just an example. There's a lot more really depressing and hidden-under-the-carpet stuff at Florida Oil Spill Law and Alexander Higgins' blogs. You have to like research journalism though.

It is also worrisome, beyond the immediate disaster the consequences that the lack of a grassroots political organization of the working class can carry: millions of people are being affected by this, including not just the disaster as such but criminal mismanagement at all levels, directly affecting health and jobs, as well as the whole ecological balance of one of the most diverse seas on which these rely and where is the response?

There is only limited response because there are not class organizations beyond unions and sectorial activist groups in the USA. As some member of the fishing community of Louisiana put it already months ago: "we are expendable". It only matters to pretend that everything is under control and to minimize losses to the big corporations.

Even if the doomsday scenario forecast by several people of the oceanic bottom ripping off and causing a huge tsunami and releasing cataclysmic amounts of usually frozen methane to the atmosphere fails to happen (I really hope so), the damage caused by corporate interests is already immense and will grow in the following months as the remainder and future residues of oil and corexit poison spread around. This should warrant people going out to the streets in protest at least every other weekend... but nobody is mobilizing this anger and frustration and the corporative masters and their politician and judiciary minions do as they please therefore.

More info resources on the Louisiana catastrophe

I recently mentioned a couple of resources to follow the oil spill info beyond what the corporate media wants to show. Another fantastic and daily updated blog I found dealing mostly with this disaster is Alexander Higgins Blog, a true research journalism site on the matter, where you can get at least some of the info denied or hidden by the authorities and the media.

Today, among other stuff, he posted this oddly beautiful (albeit sad) video made by himself with pictures of the oil spill and music from Rick Barry ("Atlantis", a song on the effects of Katrina hurricane):




The details (description and dates) for the images can be found here.

There are many interesting articles in this blog, but what really brought me there was this excellent research on the methane gas seeps around the DWH site. It seems that BP may have drilled right away through a methane field, the huge nearby RIGEL field, what may be at the origin of most of the trouble past, present and future. Because this disaster is surely not over.

Update: see also this article with maps from three days ago that contradict the claims that skimmers can't find anymore oil: it is all around!

Could the Louisiana catastrophe had been prevented by a unionized workforce?

That is what In Defense of Marxism seems to think and to me their arguments are self-evident:

Much is said in the news about the disastrous situation that now exists in the Gulf of Mexico as a result of the Deepwater Horizon explosion. An ecological disaster of gigantic proportions has been created by the profit motive, which is what drives the BP executives. However, were the company to be thoroughly unionised, with workers’ representatives controlling every level of safety, this disaster could have been averted.

Amidst the acres of newsprint about the Deepwater Horizon blowout little has been said about those who are most affected - the BP workforce.

The mood in Sunbury, in the BP head offices, is a mixture of denial and anxiety, expressed in a bitter gallows humour and blunt cynicism. Long-term employees have had several decades of management cock-ups, re-organisations, cut backs, more re-organisations, and more cut-backs. Everywhere, whether in the office decor or the lines on people’s faces, are the symptoms of 20 years of lucrative deals at the top which eventually have brought this company to its knees. Nobody - nobody - is surprised at what has happened. Every long term employee knows what lies behind this disaster. Since the 1990s the company has been running on thin air, vital services have been outsourced, and quality, like the pipelines, has decayed. "The new paradigm", the Thatcherite policy of cutting to the bone and outsourcing to the cheapest bidder, has turned into the old paradigm - long hours, poor quality, insecurity and stress.

Read full article at IDOM.


________________________

Update (Jul 25): You may also want to read this article of similar content at RandomPottins: If they had listened to workers, maybe there'd have been no disaster, and BP would not need to be "buying" scientists. (Suggested by Joe, at comments).

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.

Dead zone: 10 years later Brazilian oil spill mangrove bay has not recovered

A warning for those in Southern USA, this is what will be, probably, of your coast and sea after the BP oil disaster:


Ten years later neither the mangrove nor the fish at Guanabara Bay, in Brazil, has recovered at all, nor does it look it will do any time soon.

The affected Brazilians express their thoughts in length on their own local catastrophe ten years ago and the Louisiana oil spill today at Al Jazeera.

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.

News on the human shields against the High Speed Train

This is the continuation of the info I posted last week on four activists entering abandoned mines with the intention of becoming human shields against the destructive, undemocratic, useless and extremely costly Basque High Speed Train, that is being built in the Western Basque Country.

The information was not being actualized properly at the AHT Gelditu site, I think (at least not when I checked), but now there are several news items.

I now reckon that the people giving the press release, some of which I identified, were not the same ones going to the mines.

Whatever the case, the news are:

The Government and its companies have continued work as if nothing happened. Explosions continued on thrusday and friday and it's reported that the activists felt rocks falling, though they are alive so far. This criminal attitude triggered that a legal denounce has been placed at court.

Two of the activists chained to each other through a cement filled barrel to make forced evacuation more difficult.

Another problem they are reporting is that the mines have high humidity levels, what makes their stance very uncomfortable and unhealthy. In fact unspecified health problems have been reported.

Demo in Ordizia.
The banner reads: 'Through disobedience until the High Speed Train (AHT) is stopped. Resistance in the mines of Itsasondo'.

There was an important demonstration at Ordizia on Saturday (photo above).

As police did absolutely nothing, the AHT Gelditu platform sent a group to check for the situation of the activists, which are alive but with the important caveats mentioned above that imply serious danger for their lives and health.

Contact group wading through the mine galleries

Finally today, police has shown up at the site and it is speculated that their intention is to take them out.

___________________

Update (July 6): the four activists were finally expelled from the mines yesterday evening, reports Gara. After passing through the health center, they were arrested and charged with "public disorder, resistance and disobedience to authority".

Risking their lives to stop the High Speed Train

Four people have become human shields to stop the Basque High Speed Train (AHT-TAV) work. The four ecologists have entered an abandoned mine at Itsasondo in the Gipuzkoan highlands near where the development companies are carrying on prospections by means of continuous explosions, which could destroy the old mine nearby at any time.


Above: the four nonviolent activists at the press conference where they announced their action. I am quite sure. in spite of the low quality of the pic and the lack of names in the source, I know personally one of them (Jaxo, the second from the right) and probably all four. No big surprise: this is a really small country. Guess I'll feel emotionally obligued to go to demo this Sunday.

And sure: I feel even more worried.


The High Speed Train is a waste

Not only it is enviromentally hostile, it is a total waste: a bottomless pit for public money and a relevant factor in the public deficit that so problematic has become.

It is not me who says that, it is a big business speaker: the president of the Spanish Association of Spanish Concessions of Highways, Tunnels, Bridges and Toll Roads (ASETA), José Luis Feito declared yesterday at a major university that this type of train is useless for the low population density and rugged orography of Spain, that the existing trains (between Seville, Madrid and Barcelona) can't pay even the 30% of the costs. To offset this, he admits, the ticket price would have to be at least tripled but that would mean that nearly nobody would use them.

He instead proposes to build freight railroads, which are almost non-existent in Spain, what means that most cargo traffic goes by road, crippling them.

He acknowledged that the high speed trains in Spain are one of the causes of the growing public deficit and proposed that something will have to be done about it.


5000 euros of debt to every Western Basque

The Basque High Speed Train is projected to cost 4900 euros to each Western Basque citizen. And as the Spanish government has, in an unprecedented act of pragmatism, removed its support for the Basque HST, that means we are going to have to pay that in full (Southern Basque territories are semi-autonomous in tax collection and allocation - it has been that way since the Castilian invasions of 1199 and 1512, except partially for the fascist interlude).

For that reason there is now a campaign going on to stamp or write down on the bank notes a short message denouncing the unduly high cost that the HST is having for us. This major financial argument may possibly persuade the indifferent after all because everybody knows how hard is to gather those 4900 euros.

Thousands against the High Speed Train in Bilbao

Thousands of Basque citizens demonstrated yesterday in Bilbao against the hyper-costly and destructive project of the High Speed Train (AHT by its Basque acronym).

While it was announced yesterday that budget constrains mean that another idiotic destructive project, the second Guggenheim Museum planned for the Urdaibai Nature Reserve, is being dropped by the illegitimate Basque autonomous government, the High Speed Train connecting the three Western Basque capitals is still being developed, splitting whole districts.

The figure 4790 (photo above) reflects the debt in euros that each Western Basque is being forced into for an elitist project that has no positive value for most and has a very negative impact instead.

The High Speed Train is like a fast highway, a walled corridor that divides the areas where it goes through in two, splitting the ecosystem and the social and economical tapestry of the country. And all for nothing, because traveling between the Western Basque capitals does not take more than an hour (by car, less than two by the actual conventional train). Additionally there is no current project either in Spain nor France that would link this infrastructure to other areas or cities.

Sources: Gara[es], Berria[eu], AHT Gelditu Elkarlana[eu-es-fr].

New materials should make solar energy a lot cheaper and more effective

That's what a Swiss-Quebequois team has discovered recently: that the costly, ineffective and corrosive electrolytes used to date could be replaced by a new transparent organic material. In turn the costly platinum cathodes can be replaced by a much cheaper one made of cobalt sulphide.

Read more at Science Daily.

References:

Mingkui Wang et al., An organic redox electrolyte to rival triiodide/iodide in dye-sensitized solar cells. Nature 2010. Pay per view.

Mingui Wang et al., CoS Supersedes Pt as Efficient Electrocatalyst for Triiodide Reduction in Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2009. Pay per view.

Postcards from the Basque Coutry (Aralar)

Not all postcards have to be about urban settings and political unrest. This one is most postcard-like than others, in fact.

What you see is not just a mountain but actually a former coral reef. No wonder that the ancients venerated the mountains as emblems of Divinity, so integrated they are with everything natural, like cloud formation and rain.

But also beyond what they could understand back then: like geology and paleo-ecology.

This is what María Isabel Millán has discovered in this iconic Basque mountain: that the coral reef on top of it shows sings of sudden collapse at the OAE1a event because of acidification caused by excess of CO2. Just as is happening today.

More at Science Daily.