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As quoted from:

Tide of fear

Oil spill could be among worst ever

Latest American survey reveals disaster is ‘many times bigger’ than early estimates

By Michael McCarthy and David Usborne

Monday, 17 May 2010

“…… The new leakage rate assessment from Deepwater Horizon has come from scientists from several universities on board the US research vessel Pelican, on one of the first missions to gather scientific data about what is really happening in the Gulf, which has been backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administation (NOAA), the US agency which looks after the health of the seas. Their key finding has been that there are enormous plumes of oil hanging in the deep water, one of which is 10 miles long, three miles wide and up to 300ft thick.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Dr Mandy Joye, of the Department of Marine Science at the University of Georgia, who is co-ordinating the mission from her laboratory in Athens, Georgia. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The shallowest oil plume the group detected was at 2,300ft and the deepest was near the sea-floor at 4,200ft. The scientists are alarmed that the underwater plumes are depleting the dissolved oxygen in the seawater. The oxygen had already dropped by 30 per cent near some of the plumes, said Dr Joye.

“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. It could take years, possibly decades, for the system to recover from an infusion of this quantity of oil and gas. We’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s impossible to fathom the impact.”