| http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/gulf-suffered-a-gas-surge-study-finds/ http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo1067.html A new scientific paper reports that so much natural gas flowed into the Gulf of Mexico during last summer's oil spill that, in spots, the amount in the ocean reached 75,000 times the normal background amount. The research, led by Samantha Joye, an oceanographer at the University of Georgia, suggests that as much as 500,000 tons of gas was injected into the ocean in addition to the more than 200 million gallons of crude oil that spilled. Most of the gas appears not to have reached the surface, Dr. Joye said. Instead, it dissolved into the water or froze into ice-like flakes, spreading out into the gulf in giant plumes that also included droplets of oil, her paper reported. The injection of so much gas and oil led to a tremendous demand for oxygen in the deep ocean, Dr. Joye and her colleagues found. That is because microbes attacked the oil and gas, and they require oxygen to break the substances down. The paper postulates that oxygen may have fallen to low levels in some areas of the gulf, and marine life could have been affected, though it will likely never be possible to reconstruct exactly how much damage was done. Dr. Joye's co-authors on the new paper, to be published soon in the journal Nature Geoscience, were Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, Ira Leifer of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Vernon Asper of the University of Southern Mississippi. Their work is part of a growing body of science that attempts to assess the effects of the massive amount of gas and oil that were injected into the gulf during the three months that the out-of-control well flowed last summer. Multiple scientific controversies have arisen as researchers struggle to make sense of what happened. One paper, for instance, has reported that microbes probably succeeded in breaking down most of the gas in a matter of months. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6015/312.abstract?keytype=ref&siteid=sci&ijkey=0mWSDQdfse43A But Dr. Joye said in an interview that she doubted that conclusion, and suspected that large amounts of gas are still drifting through the gulf, albeit highly diluted by now. "I think it's going to take a long time to consume all that gas," she said. In the deep gulf, oxygen is replenished only slowly, Dr. Joye said, so oxygen depletion could persist there for years as a result of the spill. |