Gulf Oil Spill: Gulf Methane Levels One Million Times Greater Than Normal

As much as 1 million times the normal level of methane gas has been found in some regions near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, enough to potentially deplete oxygen and create a dead zone, U.S. scientists said on Tuesday.

Read the whole story: Reuters

Comments

[Just ME in T]

07:22 AM on 06/25/2010

"The potential consequences of large amounts of methane entering the atmosphere, from thawing permafrost or destabilized ocean hydrates, would lead to abrupt changes in the climate that would likely be irreversible. We must not cross that threshold.

http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/06/be-afraid-be-very-afraid.html

[Seamus45]

11:11 PM on 06/24/2010

The real "worst-case" scenario. This may have been posted before but I haven't seen it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25BE42PzZZc&feature=player_embedded

[piggybackmom]

09:27 PM on 06/24/2010

Someone else posted this today.
http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/frameset.php?pageid=http%3A//www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/210610.php

[FIGI]

12:00 PM on 06/24/2010

http://www.breitbart.tv/surf-at-pensacola-beach-boiling-like-acid/

Anybody know what this is?

[mrjames1]

03:36 PM on 06/24/2010

if indeed they are gas bubbles being released, is it possible that it is nucleation? as in when the tar washes up and the wave action increases the surface area of the oil particles making it more of a colloidal suspension, it causes an interface - and releases some of the entrapped gas.

i'm no scientist though, but i did once calculate the speed of gravity

[FIGI]

11:56 PM on 06/24/2010

Here are some responses from "TheOilDrum" website:

"That might be it. But given the huge quantities of methane being released from the well head, this could be methane that remained dissolved in a large hunk of oil that stayed together all the way to the beach. As you say, when it comes to the relative warmth and low pressure of the surface, it finally is dissociating. "
Comment from "Dohboi", June 24, 1:38 p.m.
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/6638#comments_top

Pirx: This is a comment from a "scientist". Perhaps you have heard of them.

[Walter H]

09:43 AM on 06/24/2010

Maybe we should continue the deep water drilling, but only do it in shallow water ..

[Walter H]

09:41 AM on 06/24/2010

"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine."

[pirx]

06:37 PM on 06/24/2010

Its five to one, baby, one in five, no one here gets out alive.

[Just ME in T]

06:54 AM on 06/24/2010

For goodness sake, isn’t it time to swallow pride and gratefully accept the offers being made by others, who are qualified and available to come and help fix this dreadful situation?

One would almost think the President either did not care about what is happening, or was too pig headed to see that offers of help – would be beneficial and are needed – otherwise the Requiem for The Gulf should be being practised right now! This will be the world’s largest funeral procession and the longest obituary in living memory. Maybe even one of the shortest Presidency’s in recent history too!

http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/06/impound-seize-confiscate-make-use-of.html

[right Alice]

09:55 AM on 06/24/2010

Your 'pig-headed' is vastly misplaced.

[tribalogical]

06:23 PM on 06/25/2010

OK, I saw your blog, and I read the suppositions, and I wonder what useful offers of help have actually been denied or turned down? Skimmers are only a small part of a bigger set of solutions (none of which really matter if we don't get the damned leak stopped!)... where are you getting these "facts"? I saw no sources cited. Just some name-dropping.

Your "fire engine" analogy is a bit flawed. You wrote, "Kind of like saying we could not send a fire engine to a fire somewhere, in case the fire station caught alight and needed the engine!!"

Well, OK, maybe not the fire station, but how about the house next door? We NEVER send away more than a "spare" engine to assist with large fires... because if we did what you suggest, entire neighborhoods would burn to the ground lacking any local firefighting resources...

Your declaration that "the complete inaction on the part of this administration was purposeful..." is also misrepresented and flawed from the beginning. There is no "complete inaction"... the first 5 days after Katrina? That was "complete inaction". The armies of people involved in solving this crisis are hardly representative of "inaction", much less COMPLETE inaction...

Come on. The administration is working round the clock. Organizationally it's a monster. Are they getting it 100% right? No. Are they "doing nothing on purpose..."?

Please. Are you serious?

[Yupik1]

03:45 AM on 06/24/2010

C'mon you Christian Conservatives! Pray harder!

[Yupik1]

03:43 AM on 06/24/2010

We're so totally phuked! Remember....The Republicans want to continue drilling in the Gulf. I doubt a Republican President would have appealed it when the Judge overturned the moratorium.

[ConvictMedia]

03:07 AM on 06/24/2010

People, this is dead serious crap.
Mark my words.

People are going to die from the contamination of our environment,
starts with the fish.
Then the atmosphere will take the molecular components from the water, into the clouds, over our lands, into our water table, crops, lungs.

People, I don't know what to say.

And the entire time, like the tobacco companies - Gas and Oil will team up together to fight any and all liability claims (if any are filed) - starting with the "prove it" defense.

Prove:
1- that there are oil plumes - then that those plumes below to our oil, and are not from somewhere else?
2- prove that that oil in our lungs if from our oil, it could be from the Exxon Valdez oil spill, bad health practices, smoking, pre-existing condition -

Mother - Fer's

[pirx]

06:50 PM on 06/24/2010

People already die from the contamination of our environment. What action are you willing to take is the question.

[Toa Reap]

01:49 AM on 06/24/2010

And certainly this is a strong argument for further deregulation.

The private market can take care of itself right?

[MAX1]

01:26 AM on 06/24/2010

.

The Gulf of Super Dead Zone(s).

.

[captspock]

10:50 PM on 06/23/2010

This one maybe unstoppable. If the ocean floor morphs with many fissures,will create rivers of unstoppable death.
The year is 1962,the place Centralia,P.A. an underground coal mine catches fire,such high levels of carbon monoxide that the town had to be abandoned.As I post this,the fire in P.A. still is burning still pumping out noxious gases and will continue to do so for one hundred years.
Clean Coal ?

[Toa Reap]

10:57 PM on 06/23/2010

Really!?

[David Rozgonyi]

11:44 PM on 06/23/2010

Sho' nuff! Dig the link; centralia is creeeepy...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania

[ThermoChemist]

11:56 PM on 06/23/2010

Yep. That was only one, of several, man-made disasters mentioned in a recent story here at HP..!

--The World's Most Bizarre Man-Made Disasters (PHOTOS)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/11/the-worlds-most-bizarre-m_n_571043.html

"As oil continues to flood into the Gulf of Mexico, we are reminded of just how environmentally destructive humans can be. But this isn't the first time a drilling rig has caused a major catastrophe, and oil spills and carbon emissions aren't the only way in which people ruin the environment. Here are 11 unusual, obscure and bizarre environmental disaster areas..."

[imagreate]

01:30 PM on 06/26/2010

This is true, but on a totally different scale; Centralia affected about 1500 people within a few square miles while the Gulf has a much bigger, possibly global, impact. And Centralia is only one of many coal seam fires; many start naturally while oil spills are always man made.

[captspock]

05:35 PM on 06/26/2010

I realize the scale in the Gulf is many magnitudes larger and on many different levels,environmentally,culturally, economically,socially and politically.
And if we are wise it should bring about techno-political changes for us all.Renewable energy systems should be job one.But alias,the structures of power and capital yield enormous control,and they are using leverage as I write.

[tribalogical]

10:41 PM on 06/23/2010

oh. great.

future teacher (voice from a large display panel showing a murky, desert world mostly obscured by toxic gasses): "...was once a bountiful and green planet, but now has an atmosphere similar to Neptune's, making life unsustainable..."

[mamacat]

05:27 AM on 06/25/2010

I read an article written by a scientist who studied Venus. The scientist theorized that earlier in this solar system's life, the sun was about 30% cooler, and that there were water oceans on Venus. The same scientist theorises that it only took 200,000 years for Venus to go from having water oceans, to being the sulfurous hell-hole that it is today.

Other scientists have posited that as the Sun continues to have a higher percentage of Helium, it will increase in size, until in about 1 billion years, the Sun will have swelled up to the point where Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun.

It is humbling to think that the Earth's atmosphere evolved to the point where oxygen was more than a trace element less than 500 million years ago, and in less than another 1,000 million years the Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun.

[tribalogical]

06:03 PM on 06/25/2010

That kind of expansion is apparently pretty normal in the life cycle of a star. Anything remotely "life sustaining" will be long gone before the sun expands even 20% or so... I'd say whack at least another 500 million years off of that estimate (1 billion... that's when it CONSUMES the earth... everything will be long dead well before that.

We really are in a very delicately balanced state. The sooner we learn A) to be better stewards of our global ecosystems and B) how to live off-planet in large numbers, the sooner we'll insure our survival as a species.

If we don't learn those, then we probably aren't "hardy" enough to survive Darwin's basic theory of 'natural selection'... at the rate we're going I'd even wonder how deserving we are...

[1776 or 1984]

10:23 PM on 06/23/2010

Did you hear that BP is killing the animals so that reporters can't show them?