How The Oil Spill Could Turn The Gulf Into A Fireball
Read Time:5 Minute, 26 Second
There is zero room for errors in solving the Gulf Oil Catastrophe. By the end of the grim post, you’ll understand how the Gulf could turn into a fireball.
On Thursday evening, I finally wept, because this really is a “Disaster of Biblical Proportions”, as one black blogger aptly defined it two weeks ago.
In mid-May, I stumbled on this article, “The Cover Up: BP’s Crude Politics & The Looming Environmental Mega-Disaster“, written by investigative journalist Wayne Madison.
I have mixed feelings about Madison as a person, and am cautious about assigning credibility to everything he writes, but he has a decent enough track record to consider. He wrote:
“They [his sources at FEMA and Army Corps of Engineers] add that if the ocean oil geyser is not stopped within 90 days, there will be irreversible damage to the marine eco-systems of the Gulf of Mexico, north Atlantic Ocean, and beyond.”
True. I figured that out on my own, which I wrote about on May 19th. Here’s my quick summary.
Oceans have highways and freeways to transport water around the world in what’s called the Thermohaline Circulation.
Think of the Gulf Loop as a highway that leads to a freeway called the Ocean Conveyor Belt. This “belt” moves warm and cold waters around in a way that stabilizes temperature and climate. When the “saltiness” or salinity of the ocean waters become disrupted, the great conveyor belt is affected. As I see it, the density of the oil and the ph balance of the toxic oil dispersants can’t help but affect this.
This oil dispersant is banned in the UK due to it’s toxicity. The EPA and Obama told BP stop using it but they treated it like it was a suggestion.
Madison also reported:
“At best, some Corps of Engineers experts say it could take two years to cement the chasm on the floor of the Gulf.”
Two long, oily years. Imagine the damage after the oil and BP’s toxic oil dispersants hit the ocean major artery. We think of the demise death of seabirds, fish, and dolphins, but there hasn’t much talk yet about phytoplankton, which makes much of the oxygen for the earth, or algae, krill, and plankton which are at the bottom of the food chain.
This brings me to the #1 thing that caught my eye. Madison wrote:
“There is other satellite imagery being withheld by the Obama Administration that shows what lies under the gaping chasm spewing oil at an ever-alarming rate is a cavern estimated to be around the size of Mount Everest. This information has been given an almost national security-level classification to keep it from the public.”
This ties into what nola.com, the kick azz news paper for New Orleans, LA said. To date, this May 10th article of theirs is one I have returned to repeatedly, and urge you to read in it’s entirety.
“Deposits of oil are not in underground caverns; they ooze in the pores of a sponge-like layer of rock, along with natural gas in both gaseous and the crystallized hydrate forms.
“But the hydrates also exist throughout the drilled rock formations, and like the oil below, they exert upward pressure when a drilling operation opens a path to the surface.”
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I awakened from a dream early Sunday morning that nearly all of the Gulf of Mexico was on fire. The image in my mind was a map of that region. Hopefully it won’t come true, but immediately, I had an idea of how this could occur.
If there is an underwater cavern beneath the ocean floor and site of the oil leak like Madison said, and it contains a substantial amount of methane gas, combined with the oil on top, at some point there could be a spontaneous methane explosion, or a man-made one which I’ll discuss in a moment.
This plausibly could kill tens of millions of people in states and countries around the Gulf of Mexico, based on a theory grounded in reality.
It occurred on a much smaller scale in 1986 in Lake Nyos, in Cameroon. The methane gas explosion created a ground level carbon dioxide cloud that killed many nearby villagers. See it at about 2:20 on the video below.
It’s also theorized this happened on a larger scale during the Permian Period, which wiped out 95% of life and the dinosaurs. A meteor may have struck an ocean, OR an earthquake in the ocean unsettled the ocean floor, igniting the methane gases below. That too, is illustrated in the beginning of this History Channel video:
This information ties in with the idea of nuking the oil well leak. It would be the biggest gamble ever taken in the known history of mankind.
Keith Olbermann discussed this idea that’s floating around in some circles. His guest on 6/03/2010, Dr. Michio Kaku, a physicist professor and author, made a lot of damn sense (along with having the ability to entertain) in discussing the consequences. See him at 2:00 minutes in the video. This was guy was great. What he said about hurricane season and radioactive tarballs on your roof was both sobering and funny. I wonder if BP and those involved will listen to the voice of sanity:
While this technique worked in Russia under certain circumstances, the location of our catastrophe, the amount of the oil spilled, and the presence of gas below the sea surface will ensure the end of a chapter in American life, and perhaps life itself, if nuking the site of the leak triggers a methane gas explosion.
Plausibly, a methane gas explosion in the Gulf could happen in the absence of the nuclear solution. One more oil well fire or a lightning hit during a hurricane may be all that’s needed to bring new meaning to the word, FUBAR.
Damn but I’d like the see a bunch of people involved in the negligence of this disaster – and the politicians who continue to enable them – confined to an oil-soaked island in the Gulf as a life sentence.
Otherwise, I dream and pray for a miracle… one like the parting of the waters… this time so the folly of the profiteers can be corrected, and the rest of humanity and the planet given a second chance.
If ignored, then what’s done, is done, and we just might become the new dinosaurs.
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[…] putting the lives of people living around the Gulf of Mexico at risk. They could have all died in a gigantic explosion set off by a spark, possibly from lightning or maybe by somebody lighting a […]
Relax, everyone, the ocean down there is real big.
Thank you all for your kind words. Whether the worse case scenario happens or not, it’s all so terribly, terribly sad. I never in my life thought I’d see so much devastation to the nature I love so much.
So if I come over there I should avoid lighting my cigarette then?
What a f*ck*ng world eh?
Yep, that one shook me too.
Good job, KIT, it isn’t easy to shake me up.
Man you all are scaring the heeby jeebys into me. I think I need to lay off reading about, or seeing anything about the oil spill for a bit. I can’t take it anymore.
I don’t like the sound of any of it. Scares the pants off of me.
It is not the explosive properties of methane that I fear but it’s impact on climate change. As a greenhouse gas, methane is 20 times more heat-trapping than C02. Methane is naturally present in the environment: It is dissolved in sea water and trapped inside the permafrost of arctic and sub-arctic regions such as Siberia.
What climate scientists have been warning for years: Once the permafrost starts to melt, and when ocean temperatures rise beyond a certain level, prodigious amounts of methane will be released into the atmosphere … producing a runaway effect that will accelerate the rate of global warming and can never be reversed.
There are several Armageddon scenarios, but global warming due to methane is the most likely.
Glad you mentioned that Octo, as not enough attention is brought to the fact that methane is so much more effective at trapping atmospheric heat. Even though it has a shorter lifespan than CO2. While there are many natural sources, more than half of it is caused by humans, and quite a lot of that results from our livestock and manure management. Methane bubbles caused that mining accident too, didn’t it?
I’m beginning to think Mother Earth is trying to give all of humanity a big Dutch Oven to teach us a lesson.
The administration has made it clear that they would not be nuking the Gulf. Secondly, I cannot accept this theory:
“There is other satellite imagery being withheld by the Obama Administration that shows what lies under the gaping chasm spewing oil at an ever-alarming rate is a cavern estimated to be around the size of Mount Everest. This information has been given an almost national security-level classification to keep it from the public.”
If this were truly classified information we would not be seeing it on blogs.
Finally I think this is a most important post and I share Kit’s fears. I have read it time and again, and it hurts my heart every time. Thanks for keeping us informed Kit, painful as it is for all of us.
This is incredible Kit.Thank you for your research and for bringing it over here as well. posted to FB.