When it comes to this "plume" I can't see how MOP products can be effective in the clean-up. They say the darn plume is invisible and if you swam right through it you wouldn't even notice.
I'm starting to think there is becoming an agenda to make this plume seem immediately more menacing than it really is. Now some might say it's "Greenies" wanting to stop offshore drilling. Or, some might say investors in oil spill clean-up stocks such as MOPN are pumping the severity of the plume(s) for the $$$.
Anyway, For those that imagine this plume is a big black gooey blob of oil 20 miles long and hundreds of feet thick... read this...
08/19/2010
Late Thursday, federal officials acknowledged the deepwater oil was not degrading as fast as they initially thought, but still was breaking down "relatively rapidly." Jane Lubchenco, chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said agency scientists and others were "working furiously" to come up with actual rates of biodegradation.
She noted a bright spot from the slow breakdown of the oil: Faster would mean a big influx of oil-eating microbes. Though they are useful, they also use up oxygen, creating "dead zones" that already plague the Gulf in the summer. Dead zones are not forming because of the oil plume, Lubchenco said.
The underwater oil was measured close to BP's blown-out well, which is about 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The plume started three miles from the well and extended more than 20 miles to the southwest. The oil droplets are odorless and too small to be seen by the human eye. If you swam through the plume, you wouldn't notice it.
"The water samples when we were right in the plume look like spring water," study chief author Richard Camilli said. "You certainly didn't see any oil droplets and you certainly didn't smell it."
