Toxic oil levels found in key Gulf breeding zone, scientists say

[IndianaGreen]

Posted on Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Toxic oil levels found in key Gulf breeding zone, scientists say

By Sara Kennedy | Bradenton Herald

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Scientists have found evidence that oil has become toxic to marine organisms in a section of the Gulf of Mexico that supports the spawning grounds of commercially important fish species.

Researchers from the University of South Florida said Tuesday that, in preliminary results, oil appears to reside in droplet form among the sediments of a vital underwater canyon where clouds of oil from the BP spill were found.

"So, indeed, the waters have a level of toxicity that needs to be recognized, and I think these were some of the first indicators that the base of the food web — the bacteria and the phytoplankton — may be affected," said David Hollander, chief scientist on a research vessel that just returned from a 10-day trip in the Gulf.

More than 200 million gallons of oil leaked into Gulf waters from BP's Deepwater Horizon well until it was capped last month. The oil company also used millions of gallons of chemical dispersant to break up the oil as it gushed from the runaway well off the Louisiana coast.

Researchers peering into the murk described what they saw using a process involving ultraviolet light.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/08/17/99320/toxic-oil-levels-found-in-key.html#ixzz0wvPPSBUM

[Dr.Phool]

1. I guess I'm not having grouper for dinner tomorrow after all.

[flyarm]

4. me either! Seems BP didn't buy up all the scientists! There seems to be some with a conscience!

and that refuse to lie for BP and our government!

[xchrom]

2. recommend

[Uncle Joe]

3. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, IndianaGreen.

[flyarm]

5. Check out my posts here..

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=8967119&mesg_id=8967119

[flyarm]

6. BP and NOAA were very busy buying up scientists..check it out..

some would call it bribing..or payola..


Chris Kromm: Blacklash Grows Against BP Efforts to "Buy Up" Gulf ...Jul 30, 2010 ... BP's efforts to "buy up" scientists in Gulf states was first revealed by ... BP attempted to hire the entire Marine Science Department at the University .... http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/07/whats-for-dinn... ...
www.huffingtonpost.com/.../blacklash-grows-against-b_b_... - Cached

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://coto2.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/bp-and-noaa-buy-s... /

BP and NOAA buy scientific silence

By Ben Raines
Press-Register

BP has been offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast with contracts that ban them from publishing their research. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is offering a similarly restrictive contract according to scientists, refusing to provide the media with a copy of its contract, reports Ben Raines.

For the last few weeks, BP has been offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast to aid its defense against spill litigation. BP PLC attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department at one Alabama university, according to scientists involved in discussions with the company’s lawyers. The university declined because of confidentiality restrictions that the company sought on any research.

The Press-Register obtained a copy of a contract offered to scientists by BP. It prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years.


go ahead google it up yourself...I dare you........google this up.......

BP buys up scientists in the Gulf of Mexico

[progressoid]

7. How can that be?

I thought it was almost all cleaned up. :shrug:






:sarcasm:

[flyarm]

10. we are expected to be good little soliders and swallow the Toxins and the lies!

Don't worry though..the cancers won't show up in you and your kids for quite some time.

Enjoy life while you can! Go swimming in the Gulf..eat the shrimp..you won't GLOW for a while..:sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm:

[flyarm]

8. From the St Petersburg Times , just this morning..........

http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/college/usf-scientists-find-oil-spill-damage-to-critical-marine-life/1115706
USF scientists find evidence that oil spill damaging critical marine life
St. Petersburg TImes

By Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Wednesday, August 18, 2010

ST. PETERSBURG — The oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster is still in the Gulf of Mexico and is causing ecological damage, according to new findings from the University of South Florida.

USF marine scientists conducting experiments in an area where they previously found clouds of oil have now discovered what appears to be oil in sediment of a vital underwater canyon and evidence that the oil has become toxic to critical marine organisms, the college reported Tuesday.

In preliminary results, the scientists aboard the Weatherbird II discovered that oil droplets are distributed on the gulf's marine sediment in the DeSoto Canyon, a critical spawning ground for commercially important fish species.

Laboratory tests conducted aboard the ship on the effects of oil have found that phytoplankton — the microscopic plants that make up the basis of the gulf's food web — and bacteria have been negatively affected by surface and subsurface oil.

The Weatherbird II, carrying 14 researchers and six crew members, returned to St. Petersburg on Monday from a 10-day research venture. The findings reported Tuesday must be verified in lab tests.

[flyarm]

9. From the Miami Herald yesterday

Study: Gulf oil spill still a threat to seafood safety
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/16/v-fullstory/17789...

BY FRED TASKER
[e-mail]
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill still poses threats to human health and seafood safety, according to a study published Monday by the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association.

The report comes two days after President Obama and members of his family swam in the Gulf at Panama City Beach and ate fish caught there, and hours after this year's commercial shrimping season officially kicked off along the Louisiana coast.

Federal officials disputed the new report and said ongoing testing is aggressive and sufficient to protect public health.

In the short term, study co-author Gina Solomon voiced greatest concern for shrimp, oysters, crabs and other invertebrates she says are have difficulty clearing their systems of dangerous polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) similar to those found in cigarette smoke and soot. Solomon is an MD and public health expert in the department of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.

In the longer term, she expressed worries about big fin fish such as tuna, swordfish and mackerel, saying levels of mercury from the oil might slowly increase over time by being consumed by fish lower in the food chain and becoming concentrating in the larger fish.

As time goes on, she said, doctors may be warning pregnant women and children to strictly limit the amount of such fish they eat. Some of the fish had relatively high levels of mercury even before the oil spill, she said.

``It's like iron filings to a magnet,'' she said. ``Several years from now the concentration will go up in fish at the top of the food chain -- tuna, mackerel, swordfish.''

[flyarm]

11. Plumes of Gulf oil spreading east on sea floor

Plumes of Gulf oil spreading east on sea floor
Source: CNN

CNN) -- A new report set to be released Tuesday renews concerns about the long-term environmental impact of the Gulf Coast oil disaster, and efforts to permanently plug the ruptured BP oil well have been delayed again.

Researchers at the University of South Florida have concluded that oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill may have settled to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico further east than previously suspected -- and at levels toxic to marine life.

Initial findings from a new survey of the Gulf conclude that dispersants may have sent droplets of crude to the ocean floor, where it has turned up at the bottom of an undersea canyon within 40 miles of the Florida Panhandle. The results are scheduled to be released Tuesday, but CNN obtained a summary of the initial conclusions Monday night.

Plankton and other organisms at the base of the food chain showed a "strong toxic response" to the crude, and the oil could well up onto the continental shelf and resurface later, according to researchers


Read more: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/08/17/gulf.oil.disaster /...

[flyarm]

12. hmmm the ties that bind..and payola..

Spill, Baby, Spill
By Michael Isikoff, Ian Yarett and Matthew Philips | NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated May 10, 2010

BP has been trying hard to burnish its public image in recent years after being hit with a pair of environmental disasters, including a fatal refinery explosion in Texas and a pipeline leak in Alaska. One major step was to announce, in 2007, that it had hired a high-powered advisory board that included former EPA director Christine Todd Whitman, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, and Leon Panetta, who were each paid $120,000 a year. (Panetta left when he became President Obama's CIA director.) Two years ago the oil giant's chief executive, Robert Malone, flew board members out to the Gulf of Mexico on a helicopter to demonstrate the safeguards surrounding BP's advanced drilling technology. "We got a sense they were really committed to ensuring they got it right," Whitman told NEWSWEEK.

Now BP, formerly known as British Petroleum, finds itself blamed for what could prove to be the worst oil spill in U.S. history. And only weeks after Obama announced an ambitious plan to open up more U.S. offshore waters to oil drilling, shunting aside environmental concerns from his own Democratic Party, his administration is facing a comeuppance from hell. "There was a lot of wishful thinking, I guess," says Villy Kourafalou, a scientist at the University of Miami's Rosensteil School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. "The new technologies were said to be so wonderful that we'd never have an oil spill again." Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), who had sought to block the expanded drilling, says the oil and gas industry was pushing this idea hard. "They said, 'We'll never have a repeat of Santa Barbara,'?" referring to the 1969 rig explosion off the California coast. Both the Bush and Obama administrations "were buying the line that the technology was fine," Pallone adds.

BP pressed hard to make that point in D.C. Its PR efforts included payments of $16 million last year to a battery of Washington lobbyists, among them the firm of Tony Podesta, the brother of former Obama transition chief John Podesta. Last fall, after the U.S. Interior Department proposed tighter federal regulation of oil companies' environmental programs, David Rainey, BP's vice president for Gulf of Mexico exploration, told Congress that the proposal was unnecessary. "I think we need to remember," he said, that offshore drilling "has been going on for the last 50 years, and it has been going on in a way that is both safe and protective of the environment."

Read the full article at:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/237298

[flyarm]

13. USF says government tried to squelch their oil plume findings

USF says government tried to squelch their oil plume findings

http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/article1114225.ece

By Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Tuesday, August 10, 2010


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



A month after the Deepwater Horizon disaster began, scientists from the University of South Florida made a startling announcement. They had found signs that the oil spewing from the well had formed a 6-mile-wide plume snaking along in the deepest recesses of the gulf.

The reaction that USF announcement received from the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agencies that sponsored their research:

Shut up.

"I got lambasted by the Coast Guard and NOAA when we said there was undersea oil," USF marine sciences dean William Hogarth said. Some officials even told him to retract USF's public announcement, he said, comparing it to being "beat up" by federal officials.

The USF scientists weren't alone. Vernon Asper, an oceanographer at the University of Southern Mississippi, was part of a similar effort that met with a similar reaction. "We expected that NOAA would be pleased because we found something very, very interesting," Asper said. "NOAA instead responded by trying to discredit us. It was just a shock to us."

NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, in comments she made to reporters in May, expressed strong skepticism about the existence of undersea oil plumes — as did BP's then-CEO, Tony Hayward.

"She basically called us inept idiots," Asper said. "We took that very personally."


please read the entire article!!!!!!!!