As bad as is the tragedy of oily sea birds or turtles, the most serious danger is to these creatures

[Stinky The Clown]

The phytoplankton. The bottom of the food chain. Mostly so small you can't see them. Surely so small we can't clean them. They just die. And with them die our hopes of a quick regeneration of life in the Gulf.

[MadMaddie]

1. You are right Stinky.....

This is where the basic study of science benefits society but as we see in Texas they are trying to destroy Scientific truth.

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. I offer this for your consideration

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100426-asphalt-volcanoes-domes-california-underwater/

And yes you can bet they were affected too... they are still affected...

But we know nature does recover, mostly we didn't know of this until relatively recently...

:-)

I trust that evidence like this will help us realize that as horrific as this is... nature WILL recover... it is just a question of how long after this asphalt volcano stops.

(And how much we should intervene, I am starting to think that perhaps doing less is better)

And yes I am not thinking in ONE human life time... so perhaps this is a major difference from most folks.

[Stinky The Clown]

5. NatGeo is exactly who I was going to cite. Their recent show about this oil spill ......

.... made the case that doing nothing may well be the best course in the salt marshes.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. And that wil not be very popular 'round these parts

I am starting to think that the most we should do is release oil eating bacteria. No, not the lab produced ones, the naturally existing ones.

[Mimosa]

7. Pollyanna dearest

nadinbrzezinski, it's hard for we who have lived in coastal areas to appreciate this. And petroleum and chemical pollution might last for many decades:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8435574

If this were your neck of the woods and your friends and family out of work you wouldn't be so sanguine.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. As I said, I am not looking at this in a single HUMAN lifetime

or for that matter the thousands upon thousands of lives for Phytoplankton.

And I am well aware that this will take AT LEAST ten years.

That is the the happy outcome. But you are telling me that nature will not take of this? If not, how exactly has nature dealt with this in geologic time? Oh wait, evolution... we actually have bacteria that have evolved that dissolve this stuff. That said, on a non happy ending, this could take far more than one lifetime, human that is.

But this will not kill the gulf, or destroy nature... what it will do, is exactly what any disaster does, change the nature of life. And I appreciate that far more than you understand. I know that a personal disaster changes a life, or lives, and so do massive disasters.

If you think understanding natural processes is pollyanish, then guilty as charged.

[jberryhill]

13. Remember this guy....

I get the point, but that's a long time to wait.

Yes, there used to be a lot of surface petroleum - e.g. La Brea Tar Pits - and marine leaks, but that was a long, long time ago.

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. Yes it is, especially in the US

And I am aware that the lives of probably four million people, if not more, have been changed forever, or at least, most likely, for a human life time.

And that, on the short term, we need to do something about. Alas a human life time is short term in things of this nature.

If it helps, the Ixtoc Recovery took ten years.

[theophilus]

3. Poor little mites. And we depend on them more than we realize. n/t

[Hydra]

4. Ya, and they never built these little guys into the "cost" of oil

or any of the other animals we killed with a stupid idea.

I love how when people like me brought the possibility of this up when it was relevant, we were shouted down by the "Adults," even here in DU.

Gotta love how the "adults" have it all under control, huh?

[Catherina]

6. Great post. Already wasn't the best before the BP Crime

This article was written 3 years ago :(

Despite promises to fix it, the Gulf's dead zone is growing
By Bruce Eggler

June 09, 2007, 10:17PM

Every late spring, it forms 12 miles off the Louisiana coast and lasts for months: a sprawling, lifeless band of water known as the "dead zone."



Shrimp trawlers steer clear, knowing the low oxygen in this part of the Gulf of Mexico makes it uninhabitable for fish and other marine life. It starts at the mouth of the Mississippi River and can extend all the way to the Texas border, many years growing to the size of Connecticut.
It's not a natural phenomenon. Waste water and fertilizer runoff from farms and towns hundreds of miles up the Mississippi pour billions of pounds of excess nutrients into the Gulf, sparking unnatural algae blooms that choke off the oxygen needed for the food chain to survive.

Under a process that's been in place for the past decade, a federal task force and a team of scientists appointed by the federal Environmental Protection Agency will meet in New Orleans this week to tackle the problem.

But more than five years after the task force pledged to reduce the dead zone to a quarter of its size by 2015, it's still getting bigger. A boom in corn production for ethanol is bringing more farmland on line, leading experts to predict near-record sizes this year.

Targeted federal funding for the dead zone is unlikely to appear, and scientists say voluntary measures to reduce the runoff have fallen short.



Meanwhile, researchers fear that the dead zone's persistence could permanently alter the Gulf's ecology, from the worms and bottom-dwelling organisms that anchor it all the way to the prized fish at the top.

"You reach a point where you've shifted the ecosystem to a completely different domain, and the recovery from that may be impossible," said Don Scavia, a professor of natural resources and environment at the University of Michigan and former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist who led one of the first federal studies on the dead zone in 2000. "There will be a time where the critters that typically occupy the sediment in those areas can no longer recover."

Evidence of the dead zone goes back to the 1940s, but research shows it has grown exponentially in the past four decades.

....

http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/06/despite_promises_to_fix_it_the.html

[Stinky The Clown]

8. If you overlay the oil-inducded dead zone on top of that, what you get is two adjacent dead zones

Not one colocated with the other. The oil zone almost totally misses that dead zone.

[Catherina]

11. It's the spreading devastation that upsets me.

I can't decide if I would prefer they were colocated or not. The whoel thing is such a tragedy.

[lonestarnot]

12. If we get the water cleaned up, can't we replace the plankton with other plankton from other areas?

[shireen]

16. it will take time

Ocean currents will carry planktons from the Atlantic into the area. There's a complex balancing act with many variables: breaking down of crude oil components, influx of phyto- and zooplankton, repopulation of creatures higher on the food chain. It's scary because marine environments are already very stressed from over-fishing, habitat loss, and pollution.

The Earth will always repair herself. But not on timescales to suit human beings.

[shireen]

15. they're beautiful.

A long time ago, during a pelagic birding trip off the Outer Banks, we could see the boundary between the ocean and the Gulf Stream -- the water turned from deep blue to a beautiful blue-green, indicating those waters were full of the creatures in those pictures. We saw flying fish skim across the surface waters, and gradually, more and more wonderful sights ... birds, fish, marine mammals. Someone pulled a batch of Sargassum seaweed for us to inspect: it was a micro-habitat sheltering tiny fish, shrimp, snails. Just amazing!

These phyto- and zooplankton are precious. We lose it, and the entire food chain collapses.

Edited to add: yes, the Gulf will eventually recover. But it will take time.

[CoffeeCat]

17. All hail Plankton!

[XemaSab]

18. K&R for the phytoplankton

Keystone of the ecosystem. :(

[Odin2005]

19. K&R

[Foo Fighter]

20. Damn. I clicked on this thread hoping to see pics of some of the

bastards in DC, BP execs. etc. but you're right. The spill poses no danger whatsoever to any of them. Too bad we can't say the same about the ocean or those that live near it and/or make their living from it.

[Kablooie]

21. Oceanic life forms create 70% of the earth's oxygen. Earth's atmospheric chemistry may be at stake.

[TheKentuckian]

24. Yes, people discount the incredible strains that are already on our oceans

combined with all the clear cutting. There is a point that we can push a mass extinction, people don't want to believe it but we're surely running out of slack. We have to have oxygen and the bases of the food chains.

The future recovery might be without most large life forms if we keep fucking around. Hell, I'm pretty sure if we really set our minds to it we could turn this blue watery piece into Venus II. A certain level of green house and it'll just keep building on it's self.

[TheKentuckian]

22. Absolutely

[defendandprotect]

23. k

[mike_c]

25. bingo....

:cry: