You Never Hear The Bullet ...

You never hear the bullet ...

If – or when, now days - you think of an oil spill, you probably picture a black tide engulfing beaches and coating shorebirds and sea turtles in crude. Dramatic photographs splashed across the front pages of America's newspapers call attention to their plight while the real danger goes unseen, unnoticed, and unreported.

The oil leaking from the broken well at the bottom of the ocean is everywhere — but little can be seen. When a tanker, such as the Exxon Valdez spills its contents on the surface of the ocean all at once it creates an avalanche of crude. The Gulf spill gushes continuously, out of sight, from 5,000 feet below the ocean's surface. By the end of May, according to the best estimates of the daily leakage rate, the well had poured at least 20 million gallons of crude into the Gulf, perhaps much more, making it far and away the worst oil spill in U.S. History — nearly double the output of the Alaska's Prince William Sound disaster in 1989.

Where's all the oil? Relatively little has reached the coasts so far leading scientists to fear that much of it is still lurking underwater. And it's not just the oil. The water is contaminated with massive amounts of chemicals that BP workers have been spraying for weeks to disperse the oil.

"We are now entering a different phase of this disaster," Dr. Samantha Joye, a marine biologist for the University of Georgia Department of Marine Sciences, told the news agency Bloomberg in an interview. "Everybody has been focusing on the surface impacts, which is normal. But now we've got to switch gears and start thinking about the deep water."

The evidence of subsurface pollution is overwhelming. Scientists at the University of South Florida recently discovered an enormous amount of oil at around 3,000 feet beneath the surface. The cloud of finely dispersed oil particles extends for 35 kilometers, billowing to the northeast of the Deepwater Horizon accident site. It's one of the most species-rich regions of the Gulf of Mexico.

"Unfortunately, the depth at which the oil is coming out of the well is home to the greatest diversity of species in the entire Gulf region," explains Thomas Shirley of the Harte Research Institute. Biologists have counted more than 1,000 species at that depth, and they can only guess at what the oil and chemicals are doing to them.

Initial results suggest that the cloud is drifting toward the DeSoto Canyon, which is near the coast, on the edge of the continental shelf. There, nutrient-rich water rises from the depths. The area is filled with meter-long red tuna, shimmering kingfish and grouper. Gardens of intricately branched corals flourish on the sea floor.

"The spawning season for many fish has just started. What happens when fish eggs and larvae are bathed in oil?" Biologist John Dindo asks. "An entire year's worth of young fish could be lost."

The scientists are worried about acute poisoning, as well as genetic damage and later deformities. "The oil impairs the organ functions of the marine creatures," says toxicologist Joe Griffitt of the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory in Ocean Springs. This, he adds, will impair fertility and larval development. Oil components could also become concentrated in the food chain.

In fact, scientists know very little about the effects of oil deep in the ocean. Neither BP nor the U.S. scientific authorities have attached much importance to the issue until now. For the first time, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has now dispatched a ship, the Gordon Gunter, to study the phenomenon.

Scientists will need to keep watching and measuring carefully. That will be especially true for the invisible, underwater environment, where oil plumes and chemical dispersants pose a toxic threat to sea life. In this case, it is what we can't see that can — and will — continue to hurt us.

Round 2 Entry for "Talent Pond Tennis - CLOSED"  [13+]
"Write a nonfiction article or report on a current issue or problem."

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Ken