Exploding Sea Snot!

Boing Boing
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Doomsday coming? Truth, theory or conspiracy theory? (or bad joke?) - DEBUNKED

Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a world-killing event - by Terrence Aym - Helium
According to Terrance Aym, writing at Helium.com, the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may be triggering events below the ocean floor there that may lead to the extinction of most life on Earth within the next 6 months. Read the article at the link above, including the references cited and you be the judge.

Here is a response to Aym's article:
RedBedHead: BP Oil Disaster May Destroy Planet Earth!
...

Bummer. So much for that vacation I've been saving up for, now we're all gonna be dead and there won't be any fish in the lake where we rented that cottage. One more reason to hate BP - apocalyptic pricks.

But seriously, while this Terrence Aym dude is a crank - with a writing portfolio full of articles on "Bizarre UFO sightings", time travel, and the "Coming sun storms [that] could slam USA into 'Greatest Depression'" - and that makes this article just shy of funny a la The Onion, it's also annoying. Why? Because it contributes to the kind of anti-intellectual fervour that is the foundation stone of contemporary American culture and which writes off important and urgent truths, like climate change. I'm all for a good joke and for taking the piss out of most things but this isn't being pitched as a joke and there's nothing worse than a joke that isn't meant to be a joke. Not only because it makes guys like me who try to be funny feel a sense of shame that we've been unintentionally outdone by an idiot but because it delegitimizes the subject at hand. "You're just like the Weekly World News with that BP spill is the end of the world stuff." "Ha ha, yeah sure, we're all gonna die." Well, maybe we're not all gonna die and the world isn't about to release a cosmically huge, wet fart but a lot of sea animals are dying because of BP, and a lot of people are having their livelihoods and lives destroyed all along the Gulf coast. Because of this seemingly unstoppable debacle, the world's oceans are one step further down death row ...

DEBUNKED!
Methane Bubble "Doomsday" Story Debunked
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While it's true that there are methane bubbles (and methane ice) beneath the ocean floor, they are not about to erupt from Gulf and destroy all life on Earth. This morning I spoke with two Earth scientists, Dave Valentine of UC Santa Barbara and Chris Reddy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, who study methane and oil seeps from the sea floor. Valentine has just been out to the Gulf to study the methane levels there, and told io9:

During our recent cruise to the Gulf we observed significantly elevated levels of methane at water depth greater than 2500 feet, in the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon spill site. While the total quantity of methane and other hydrocarbons is enough to cause problems with the regional ecosystem, there is no plausible scenario by which this event alone will cause global-scale extinctions.

So yes, there is a methane seep. No, it will not cause tidal waves or explode.

Another fishy fact in the methane bubble doomsday story is Aym's description of how methane bubbles are what caused the End Permian mass extinction event 250 million years ago - a mass extinction that I wrote about recently, here. Many scientists do believe that atmospheric changes and ocean anoxia (de-oxygenization) were to blame for that extinction - but even Gregory Ryskin, the scientist whose highly speculative work is cited in the article, doesn't try to claim this as the sole cause, nor does he believe that one bubble of methane could bring down the biosphere instantly. The End Permian extinction took millennia to happen.

So the BP oil spill isn't going to end the world - it's just going to kill a lot of ocean life. And already-existing methane seeps may be doing slow, deadly damage to our climate. All this makes it even more obvious that we need to invest in alternate forms of energy. But who wants to hear difficult, complicated pieces of information, when we could just be screaming about doomsday? ...

Thousands of abandoned oil well in the Gulf of Mexico pose risk

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/07/27000_abandoned_oil_and_gas_we.html
Excerpt:

As a forceful reminder of the potential harm, the well beneath BP's Deepwater Horizon rig was being sealed with cement for temporary abandonment when it blew April 20, leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation's history. BP alone has abandoned about 600 wells in the Gulf, according to government data.

There's ample reason for worry about all permanently and temporarily abandoned wells -- history shows that at least on land, they often leak. Wells are sealed underwater much as they are on land. And wells on land and in water face similar risk of failure. Plus, records reviewed by the AP show that some offshore wells have failed.

Experts say such wells can repressurize, much like a dormant volcano can awaken. And years of exposure to sea water and underground pressure can cause cementing and piping to corrode and weaken.

"You can have changing geological conditions where a well could be repressurized," said Andy Radford, a petroleum engineer for the American Petroleum Institute trade group.

Whether a well is permanently or temporarily abandoned, improperly applied or aging cement can crack or shrink, independent petroleum engineers say. "It ages, just like it does on buildings and highways," said Roger Anderson, a Columbia University petroleum geophysicist who has conducted research on commercial wells.

Despite the likelihood of leaks large and small, though, abandoned wells are typically not inspected by industry or government.

Oil and gas leaking from fissures in the sea floor

Fillibluster: Video proves oil and gas leaking from sea floor
Potential environmental catastrophe on the level we have never seen before.
Excerpts:
BP denies it. But this video confirms it: oil is leaking from cracks in
the sea floor. It could spell the beginning of a far worse catastrophe
than anyone expected. If the sea bed fissures and collapses around the
well bore, the flood of oil will be of an order of magnitude that the
world has never experienced.


The sea floor in this area of the Gulf of Mexico is not solid rock, but
rather sand held together by a substance called methane clathrate, or
"fire ice", in which methane is trapped within ice crystals. It's the
same substance that fouled the "top hat" containment dome BP tried, and
forms when methane and water combine under high pressure. It's not
exactly dense or stable.

...
So, what happens if there's a collapse of the unstable seabed over the
existing gusher? That depends on the extent of the collapse. As the bore
hole continues to erode, eventually the casing will detach and relief
wells will become irrelevant. At that point, the entire reservoir of oil
-- approximately 2 billion barrels -- could empty over the course of
the next few decades.
...

Gulf oil spill "Top Kill" procedure begins

Gulf oil spill: 'Top kill' procedure begins | Greenspace | Los Angeles Times

Guld Oil Slick - the real story

LiveLeak.com - Amateur Video Of Gulf Oil Slick - Worse Than BP Admits
Watch the video.
"... some speculate it may be closer to 1 million gallons per day." "It's not a leak, it's a volcano spewing oil."