Friday, July 16, 2010
BP’s oil disaster is threatening to choke off the oxygen in some portions of the Gulf of Mexico as a result of too much natural gas having leaked from the broken well. Scientists have found natural gas levels accumulating at a rate of 100,000 times higher than normal at depths greater than 3,000 feet below the gulf surface.
Although most of public attention has been focused on the 182 million gallons of oil that have gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon accident is estimated also to have released about 12 billion cubic feet of natural gas into the gulf.
Tiny microbes naturally found in the ocean will consume the gases. But the process also means the depletion of oxygen, with the microbes needing almost five times more oxygen than presently exists in the water to break down all of the natural gas.
Too little oxygen could result in a condition similar to what is found today at the bottom of the Black Sea, where little or no life exists.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Scientists Say Gulf Oil Disaster Altering Food Web (by Matthew Brown and Ramit Plushnick-Masti, Associated Press)
Gassing the Gulf (by Stephanie Ramage, Atlanta Sunday Paper)
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