Oil in the Sea III

The following pie chart is from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.  This comes from our own government yet President Obama still points the finger at BP and the oil rig owners instead of at Mother Nature.  Next thing you know, President Obama will regulate Mother Nature by taxing her for the cleanup of oil in the oceans! 

Natural seepage of crude oil into the marine environment

Natural oil seepage into the ocean's has been happening for millions of years and scientists have known for years about it.  Granted, the spill in the Gulf of Mexico is awful to the marine life, it is not something new to the earth or to the oceans. 

Excerpt from FoxNews article on May 21, 2009:

"Microbes consume most, but not all, of the compounds in the oil. The next step of the research is to figure out just why that is."


"Nature does an amazing job acting on this oil but somehow the microbes stopped eating, leaving a small fraction of the compounds in the sediments," said study co-author Chris Reddy, a marine chemist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Mass. "Why this happens is still a mystery, but we are getting closer."  Read full article here

The USGS has known about oil seeps in the ocean and you can read the report here.

Guest Essay: Oil will be in ocean for a long time

By Norman F. Barnes Posted: Saturday, May 8, 2010 5:39 pm

The recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill will be greater than we have ever had before, and certainly far greater than the Exxon Valdez catastrophe of 21 years ago.

The present discharge of some 200,000 gallons of oil a day is a tremendous amount, particularly when we know that the oil gush cannot be quickly shut off, taking months and working perhaps a mile below the surface of the Gulf waters.

Wow! What happens to all that oil? Where does all the oil go?

Those are difficult questions to answer. As horrendous as it may seem, many times this amount of oil enters the oceans each year, some billion and a half gallons of oil.....

Read More here...