Geek News You Don't Need

[the other andrea]

GET TO THA CHOPPA

wow! 

[PVC Barbie]

Fucked.

I said as much a month ago but got 'd

(there's squabbling in the comments about the veracity, but it's still interesting. The ex's bro-in is a hydrogeologist who says liquids do strange things below the surface. Would be cool to get his opinion on this mess. I suspect it'd be laced with expletives)

[random axe]

It's certainly plausible that the entire well has been compromised, and probably true that oil companies should not be allowed to drill this deeply offshore.  I think the uncertainty regarding the current situation shows that they don't even know enough about the possible results even if this particular disaster hadn't occurred.

However, it's not necessarily true that there's no way to deal with this.  No conventional way, but, again, this is why a well like this shouldn't have been allowed in the first place.  The oil companies are not equipped to deal with this, and if they aren't neither is anyone else. 

The oil is currently coming up, as far as I've heard, in a single location.  In theory, virtually the entire leak could be captured.  The leak would tend to become somewhat worse over time (due to erosion, basically) but would also probably eventually slow down (due to loss of pressure).  I have no idea how much oil might be down there, under how much pressure -- and I'm not sure BP really has any idea, either, quite frankly -- and I'm not sure just how hard it would be to capture all the oil leaking out.  Certainly, it would require new techniques and new equipment.  So hurry up on that.

Also, relief wells ought to work.  They'd give the oil other, safer ways to escape.  Frankly, I think other companies should drill any relief wells and get to keep the oil they get, and maybe BP should subsidize their efforts, too.

I hate to say it, but 'the oil keeps leaking out for the foreseeable future' is not the worst-case scenario.  Worst-case scenarios include massive escapes of waxy hydrocarbons, like 'small' poisonous and highly flammable icebergs; huge releases of methane, ruining the region for shipping, causing fireballs, and doing the atmosphere no favors; earthquakes due to pressure changes down there; ocean floor collapse, leading to tsnuamis and maybe vulcanism in the Gulf; massive anoxic zones where everything dies; surf on fire; WD-40 hurricanes; toxic clouds; cats and dogs living together . . . .

Eh.  Who knows?  I guess we'll find out.

[PVC Barbie]

Well, in their defense - Vulcans are ok. A little humorless, but, that's not so bad.

[random axe]

Via Frak, one of the stranger news articles I've read in some time.  If it weren't in the Stanford newspaper, I would've assumed it was crankery, but apparently not.

Basically, it says that radioactive decay of unstable elements is affected by the sun, which was not previously known.  No one's sure how this effect occurs, although it might be somehow be caused by neutrinos or some new particle.  Neither seems likely, but it seems to be something emitted by the sun, something that generally goes undetected (until now), and something that can pass through the whole planet.

It may also give us a way to predict solar flares, which I imagine is one of the ways it's being tested now.  Also weird is that Hmof and I were just joking about solar neutrinos over at Fbook . . . although that was probably not caused by mysterious particles emanating from the sun.

[Lindsey Buckinghmof]

That is very strange.

[stormneedle]

The article assumed the causality arrow goes from the sun to the planet.

I'm just messing around, but ...

[random axe]

Fluctuations in isotropic decay cause solar flares?

It does seem even less likely.

[Lindsey Buckinghmof]

Missing oil found. It's ... on the bottom? WTF? That's weird. Probably because of the dispersant, actually.

And in more weird news, my first thought about reading this was, "Hey, Mandy Joye's in the news! Hi, Mandy! "

oy.

[random axe]

I explained to a fair number of people that if that much oil had somehow been eaten by microbes in such a short period of time, the microbes would be very, very much in evidence.

It's like having kudzu destroy a huge forest in a week.  Could that happen?  Tend to doubt it.  But, thing is, you'd have a hard time not seeing kudzu where the forest was last week.

Never mind that an abrupt appearance of sixty skillion tons of microbial biomass might somehow be a problem on its own . . . or that there might be any downside to the sudden appearance of microbes that can eat that much oil that quickly.

[Lindsey Buckinghmof]

Well ... maybe. Remember oil is very nitrogen/phosphorus/etc poor so it's basically an energy source for microbes that eat it. If they don't have enough of the other nutrients they just burn it and it goes to CO2, they can't synthesize much biomass from it. So you can and do get a lot of oil consumption from a small number of bacteria. But I agree that it seems unlikely that that large a pool of oil were to disappear that quickly just from microbial action. Much more likely that it got tweaked by the dispersant. Having it sink is new to me.

[random axe]

But, still, to process THAT much oil in that incredibly short period of time?  The right-wing pundits were reporting that most of the oil had vanished in like two months.  Regardless of where the biomass came from, it seems like you'd need a hell of a lot of bacteria. 

I mean, I don't know the current realistic estimate of the size of the spill, but the last non-oil-company number I remember hearing was a hundred million gallons.  So, crazy back-of-envelope . . . if you were burning that much oil in, oh, say, diesel-powered whole-house generators, well, google suggests those things will run about three hours on a gallon of fuel.  Two months divided by three hours is a little less than five hundred.  So five hundred gallons would keep one generator running all that time, or, I should say, one generator running continuously for that long would use up five hundred gallons.

So to use up 100 million gallons would take 200,000 generators running continuously for two months.  That would be hard to miss, even in an area the size of the spill.  And even if known microbes are maybe much more efficient than that (which seems unlikely to me since the engines use higher temperatures), the by-products must surely be detectable.  I mean, if all that oil were combusted, the CO2 would be noticeable, wouldn't it?  That's just a lot of oil.

I don't know squat about what petroleum whatnot sinks in sea water, but if it didn't evaporate, didn't all wash up on the beach, isn't on the surface, and doesn't seem to be in the water . . . it probably sank.  So I guess I can believe it.  It went somewhere, and I'd be more surprised to learn it's all bug farts already.

[Lindsey Buckinghmof]

Yep it sank. Now it's killing coral.

The usual commentary from me: I went to grad school at UCSB with Chuck Fisher, he's a good scientist but kind of a dick. That's what's required in this situation, so that's not a negative comment in this context. I don't know Shank.

[Lindsey Buckinghmof]

OK I was NOT expecting this.

My usual commentary; Mary was my advisor when I was an undergrad - I took classes with Ken (who was a grad student at the time). They're both awesome.

N.B. This is another explanation for the extinction of mermaids.

[random axe]

Was it thought that it only occurred near the coast because that's where there was appropriate pollution?  Or was it just not previously observed farther out?

My theory about the mermaids is that if sailors couldn't tell them apart from manatees, maybe mermaids couldn't tell each other apart from manatees, either.  Presumably the manatees could tell the difference, but you'd always tend to have more breeding pairs of manatees than of mermaids/mermen.

This theory also explains why pirates are now fairly rare, and presumably it's not global warming but dropping manatee populations that accounts for the resurgence of piracy.

It's a theory, anyway.