A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [63]
I’ve known Jane Lubchenco for close to twenty years, and in the late 1990s I spent a lot of time with her when we were part of a team traveling to various cities to tell people about how the ocean is changing. I respect her very much. But there comes a time when political pressures cause a person to try to distinguish between “plumes” and “anomalies,” though those are two words for the same thing. One can parse language into droplets so small that the facts dissolve to difficult-to-detect dilutions; one can disperse truth itself. People get confused, get the wrong impression. Sometimes that’s the goal. So it’s better to stand with the truth. Political situations come and go. What begins and what ends, and what follows a person forever after, is the truth. Obviously the oil is in the water. It comes from somewhere, it has to go somewhere, and the water is where.
A scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory says that even without dispersants, oil originating with such force at this depth and pressure breaks into zillions of droplets that stay suspended in the water.
Not as visually shocking as dead pelicans, but much more basic, is the plight of the minute clouds of life at the base of the food chain. The things that grow the fish that magically become leaping dolphins and plunging seabirds—tiny things living deep, almost beyond the reach of human acknowledgment—are probably having a pretty hard time right now across large swaths of the Gulf.
The deep sea contains a galaxy of little animals—everything from planktonic beasts to jellies to billions of small fishes called lantern-fishes (myctophids). They all live in a layer of life that twice a day performs the greatest animal migration on Earth, from the darkness of deep daytime waters to the darkness of shallow nighttime waters, and back again. This zone of life is like a flying carpet throughout an astonishingly large portion of the world ocean. On a moving ship, it is extraordinary to watch it on the sonar as it slowly rises and dives over the course of the day, even while your ship is covering hundreds of miles. Proponents of dispersants contend that by dissolving the oil, microbes can more easily feed on it. But before that happens, these billowing toxic clouds will roll through this zone of life in the Gulf, where the damage will likely never really be assessed.
I’m not saying it’s utter catastrophe for all of them. I’m not saying they won’t bounce back. I’m saying, Let’s not fool each other. Let’s attend to the matters to which the researchers are calling our attention. Let’s not be in denial of science, logic, and sense. That’s indecent.
BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, insists there’s “no evidence” of hydrocarbon plumes in the Gulf. There are wiggly pigs, and then there are liars.
For an alternate take, we turn to Florida State University oceanographer Ian MacDonald: “These are huge volumes of oil, in many cubic kilometers of water.”
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration acknowledges that it has “confirmed the presence of very low concentrations of sub-surface oil at depths from 50 meters to 1,400 meters.” In other words, from shallow waters down to around 4,000 feet. But they say it’s in “very low concentrations,” less than 0.5 parts per million. The thing is, a concentration of hydrocarbons in the range of less than 0.5 parts per million—say 0.4—is in the range of a notably polluted place like Boston Harbor. So one person could say, “It’s not going to kill everything,” and another could say, “The oil is polluting an enormous volume of water in the Gulf of Mexico.” They’d both be right.
From the federal government, we get both a little more minimizing—“We have always known there is oil under the surface”—and this honest admission of ignorance: “The questions we are exploring are where is it, in what concentrations, where is it going, and what are the consequences for the health of the marine environment?” So asks NOAA administrator