Thread: Natural gas 'accelerated' breakdown of Gulf oil

BBC News - Natural gas 'accelerated' breakdown of Gulf oil

Bacteria breaking down oil from the Gulf of Mexico leak have been fuelled by natural gas in the water, a study suggests.

I would like to say i believe this but there is a lot of guessing involved. Personally i think its about as good as its going to get. What does land on the bottom will kill everything it touches. On the upside of thing the currents will eventually cover it with sand and new life will spawn.

The one thing that should be of concern.......................

Results suggested the gas was being rapidly consumed by naturally occurring bacteria within the water, and that this process was also greatly depleting oxygen levels in the water.

........I can't think that this can be good.

Originally Posted by Kraker Jak

sounds to me like we will have alot of hydrogen gas being created...


H2O....minus the O.....

That would be awesome, but that's not the oxygen that they're burning.

Originally Posted by gatita_andy

Anyone?
wow, guess ill have to do it................

Lol
But seriously, its good that more of the problem is getting taken care of. If it speeds up the process, thats great. The non-sessile organisms have the ability to move to areas with a higher concentration of oxygen while the sessile ones were going to get screwed by the oil anyways.

Originally Posted by hawgballs

The one thing that should be of concern.......................
........I can't think that this can be good.

Originally Posted by flame

I agree with that, would have been nice if they defined "greatly depleted" and gave estimates of how long it would take to normalize or how wide spread depleted oxygen levels could be found. Things are probably ok if it takes a month to normalize, not so much if it takes 5 years.

From Scientific American article sitting on my desk August 2010 pg. 14,17

...Microbes chomping on a spill the size of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe come with a dark side. While eating the oil, the microbes consume the oxygen in the water, potentially asphyxiating that aerobic organisms. Measurements of oxygen depletion weeks after the spill detected as much as a 30 percent drop in in the Gulf of Mexico seawater. Although this amount of depletion has little impact on mobile marine life, scientists worry about anoxic effects down deep, where mixing with oxygen-rich surface waters is minimal....