The missing plume found?

[depakid]

Oil from a blown-out well is forming huge underwater plumes below a visible slick in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists said as BP wrestled for a third day Sunday with its latest contraption for slowing the nearly month-old gusher. One of the plumes is "as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots," the New York Times reported. "The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given."

BP, the largest oil and gas producer in the U.S., has been unable to thread a tube into the leak to siphon the crude to a tanker, it's third approach to stopping or reducing the spill on the ocean floor nearly a mile below the surface. Engineers remotely steering robot submersibles were trying again Sunday to fit the tube into a breach in a seafloor pipe, BP said.

Oil has been spewing since the rig Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20, killing 11 people and sinking two days later. The government shortly afterward estimated the spill at 210,000 gallons – or 5,000 barrels -- a day, a figure that has since been questioned by some scientists who fear it could be far more. BP executives have stood by the estimate while acknowledging there's no way to know for sure.

The Times noted:

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

"The answer is no to that," a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. "We're not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It's not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort."

BP also owns a rig that operated with incomplete and inaccurate engineering documents, which one official warned could "lead to catastrophic operator error," records and interviews show.

Two months before the Deepwater Horizon accident, 19 members of Congress called on the agency that oversees offshore oil drilling to investigate a whistle-blower's complaints about the BP-owned Atlantis, which is stationed in 7,070 feet of water more than 150 miles south of New Orleans.

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20100516/us-gulf-oil-spill/

[thereismore]

1. Missing oil = ticking bomb. We need oil plume monitoring, paging Gov. Jindal! nt

[mrJJ]

2. 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots

ROBERT, La. -- Oil from a blown-out well is forming huge underwater plumes below a visible slick in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists said as BP wrestled for a third day Sunday with its latest contraption for slowing the nearly month-old gusher. One of the plumes is "as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots," the New York Times reported. "The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/15/giant-oil-plumes-found-in_n_577654.html

[FBaggins]

3. Much of that doesn't make sense.

10 miles long but three miles wide by one foot thick would be over 100 million gallons (substantially more than the worst estimates to date for that one plume alone). It's obviously an irregular shape, but if it's 300 feet thick in spots, it's probably a very conservative estimate.

That just doesn't make sense. If it was possible for a single well to put out that much oil, the industry would look very different.

Do they go into any detail regarding HOW they spotted these plumes and what's keeping the oil suspended when oil naturally travels to the surface?

[IDemo]

4. Very likely not a solid mass

Most of what is escaping the pipe is methane gas (or so I read on the Internet). The plumes are more than likely a mixture of crude and gas.