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News Briefs 24-05-2010

Best news I’ve heard lately: After keeping us waiting for a century, Mark Twain is about to reveal all.

Thanks, Red Pill Junkie.

Quote of the Day:

In the month that has passed since the Deepwater Horizon sank, after an explosion that killed 11 people, we have all become aware of the cracked pipes and the valves that failed; of underwater robots and ineffectual oil capturing domes. Much like those struggling seabirds, such things are easier to comprehend than the enormous, opaque reality that exists at the coalface of an undersea environmental catastrophe.

The reality is a grim picture of fish swimming in poison, feeding on organisms fed on poison, while poison gushes from below and is sprayed from above. The Gulf of Mexico is one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. This is not just a sad tale of valves and scenery. This is awful.

What Lies Beneath

  1. Oil
    I disagree with the negativity about the gulf oil “disaster” – in the short term it is devastating to life much like in the short term being immersed in water will drown you… but in the longer term as the anaerobic oil begins to aerate it will begin to foster vast blooms of aquatic flora whose growth will accelerate the digestion of the oil and as a side effect produce enormous amounts of oxygen for both water and land based life, as well as being a huge source of food for the critters that survive on the event’s perimeter. Let’s be very clear: petroleum is a fuel, it contains energy. Biological machines can run on it through catalytic digestion just the same as the machines of man can run on it through combustion. You inject a body of stored fuel into an environment and the fuel will be used. Leave the bloody oil alone and the problem WILL take care of itself, and WILL leave the planet richer for it.

    1. Reply: oil
      Humans are the only thing on earth that can take away the flight of the bird and still leave it alive. The devastating fact about the oil is the amount it has to destroy before it can create. Yes it will work itself out, however, the cost of fishing loss, people’s homes and beaches being ruined, and the tourist economy can not be fixed. Maybe you don’t live at the shore, but I am someone who regularly watches as heeps of trash wash on my beach, which is also a wildlife preserve like the one in Louisiana, and I can’t just shrug this off like some have. There have been days when barges full, literally, of medical waste, fishing hooks, and other crap have washed on my shore; so much in fact they closed my beach for two weeks. Try walking on five feet thick of pollution poisoned mussels that are rotting in the 90 degree sun in order to clean it up so the birds don’t die from tainted water, like I did last summer.

      What will likely start to happen within the next few months is algae blooms will start cropping up as they devour the chemicals in the water. These algae suck oxygen from the water, killing even more fish and wildlife. If you were on the water you wouldn’t want dead fish washing up on your doorstep. It’s a damn shame that it has to kill off all that life before it fixes itself. About 10 years later…

      lots of news today

      1. Dead Zone
        A large part of the gulf of Mexico is already a dead zone. All the Nitrogen-rich fertilizers that US farmers use are constantly dumped to the gulf through the Mississippi river, causing the blooming of red algae LastLoup aptly mentioned.

        Maybe if we changed the name, you might start considering taking a better care of it? Go ahead, call it the Gulf of Florida, for all I care; just don’t treat it as your backyard waste dump anymore, all right?

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