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View Full Version : How the ultimate BP Gulf disaster could kill millions




WarDog
06-18-2010, 04:44 PM
Yet the disaster that followed the loss of the rig pales by comparison to the apocalyptic disaster that may come.

A cascading catastrophe

According to worried geologists, the first signs that the methane may burst its way through the bottom of the ocean would be fissures or cracks appearing on the ocean floor near the damaged well head.



http://www.helium.com/items/1864136-how-the-ultimate-bp-gulf-disaster-could-kill-millions




Capitalists can exploit you only with your permission: by trading with you, selling to you, asking you to sell out.Government exploits you at the point of a gun.As long as you limit the power of the latter, the former can only exploit by providing better products, services and options. if they collude, then all bets are off. But that is a problem with government in that case fascism-not capitalism.

MsDoodahs
06-18-2010, 04:55 PM
okay this is a little disturbing.

:eek:

edited to add: luckily, the author states, "equals in its fury the Indonesian tsunami that killed more than 600,000."

The death toll estimates are much lower than 600K, so ... the author is intentionally trying to disturb/scare the crap out of the reader. Once you choose to inflate a number like that as a scare tactic, you lose cred.

:)

Travlyr
06-18-2010, 05:08 PM
Fear, fear and more fear.

Anti Federalist
06-18-2010, 05:22 PM
*sigh*


None other than the engineer who helped lead the team to snuff the Gulf oil fires set by Saddam Hussein to slow the advance of American troops has stated that a huge underground lake of methane gas—compressed by a pressure of 100,000 pounds per square inch (psi)—could be released by BP's drilling effort to obtain the oil deposit.

What engineer is that? I see no link to any engineers statements. And Red Adair put most of those fires out along with his sidekicks that later formed Boots and Coots.



By some geologists' estimates the methane could be a massive 15 to 20 mile toxic and explosive bubble trapped for eons under the Gulf sea floor. In their opinion, the explosive destruction of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead was an accident just waiting to happen.

Yet the disaster that followed the loss of the rig pales by comparison to the apocalyptic disaster that may come.

A cascading catastrophe

According to worried geologists, the first signs that the methane may burst its way through the bottom of the ocean would be fissures or cracks appearing on the ocean floor near the damaged well head.

What worried geologists?

Good fucking grief, this is now jumping the shark.

It's like nobody saw a runaway well before.

Travlyr
06-18-2010, 05:25 PM
*sigh*

Good fucking grief, this is now jumping the shark.

It's like nobody saw a runaway well before.

Cool. Thanks. :cool:

MsDoodahs
06-18-2010, 05:27 PM
It's like nobody saw a runaway well before.

uh....most americans haven't. :o

MelissaWV
06-18-2010, 05:32 PM
Why kill billions when you could kill... millions?

Anti Federalist
06-18-2010, 06:58 PM
uh....most americans haven't. :o

http://www.psywarrior.com/KuwaitOilFire002.jpg

Yeah they did, if they were adults in 1990/91.

Saddam set hundreds of them on fire.

I remember people like Carl Sagan running around saying these fires would never be put out, they'd burn for 20 years, triggering environmental Armegeddon and "nuclear winter" where billions would die due to crop failure.

The fires were put out in six months.

susano
06-18-2010, 07:10 PM
Fear, fear and more fear.

There's fear mongering (the Muslims are gonna get us, global warming is gonna kill us, etc) and there is reality. The Deepwater Horizon drilled into very unstable formation and the technology to fix this fuck up hasn't changed since Ixtoc. Concern about something catastrophic is legitimate - not that it isn't already catastrophic for the marine life.

susano
06-18-2010, 07:15 PM
I'm putting this up for elucidation about WTF it is that "we" (humans) are doing, rather than for a market vs. regulation discussion. I think it's impossible to have a discussion about something we know damn little about - meaning that unintended consequences can and do occur.




Proponents of the abiotic, deep-earth theory of the origin of oil point argue that the deep fracturing of the basement bedrock at Cantarell caused by the meteor’s impact was responsible for allowing oil formed in the Earth’s mantle to seep into the sedimentary rock that settled in the huge underwater crater.
Geologists have documented that the bedrock underlying the crater shows “melt rock veinlets pointing to large megablock structures as well as a long thermal and fluid transport” as part of the post-impact history. In other words, the bedrock at Cantarell did suffer sufficiently severe fracturing to open the bedrock to flows of liquids and gases from the deep earth below. ...".

Thomas Gold said, in his book "The Deep Hot Biosphere" (Copernicus Books 2001):
"... Earth's massive reserves of hydrocarbons ... were part of the primordial "soup" from which our planet was created ... to this day they exist in abundance deep within our planet and continue to upwell toward the surface. ... Methane hydrate ... covers very large areas of ocean floor ...[there]... are sudden outbursts of gas from the ocean floor ... as in the eruption that caused a dvastating tsunami on the coast of Papua, New Guinea, in July 1998 ...".

So, oil and methane were originally BELOW the "very old, hard rock", and when the Chicxulub impact hit the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, it fractured the "very old, hard rock" and allowed the oil and methane to come up to the surface and form pools under the salt layer, which pools BP was smart enough to find,and
in April 2010 the oil and methane blew out the BP Gulf of Mexico well.

WHAT DID THE METHANE HAVE TO DO WITH THE BP WELL BLOWOUT ?

According to a guardian.co.uk article by David Sassoon dated 21 May 2010:
"... The vast deepwater methane hydrate deposits of the Gulf of Mexico are an open secret in big energy circles. ... For the oil and gas industry, the substances are also known to be the primary hazard when drilling for deepwater oil. ... Methane hydrates are volatile compounds — natural gas compressed into molecular cages of ice. They are stable in the extreme cold and crushing weight of deepwater, but are extremely dangerous when they build up inside the drill column of a well. If destabilized by heat or a decrease in pressure, methane hydrates can quickly expand to 164 times their volume. Survivors of the BP rig explosion told interviewers that right before the April 20 blast, workers had decreased the pressure in the drill column and applied heat to set the cement seal around the wellhead. Then a quickly expanding bubble of methane gas shot up the drill column before exploding on the platform on the ocean's surface.
Scientists are well aware of the awesome power of these strange hydrocarbons ... their sudden escape is considered to be a threat comparable to an asteroid strike or nuclear war. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a Livermore, Ca.-based weapons design center, reports that when released on a large scale, methane hydrates can even cause tsunamis. ...".

COULD THE GULF OF MEXICO METHANE CAUSE A TSUNAMI ?

cont. with photos

http://www.jerrypippin.com/OilSpillArea.htm

Found the above in this thread for those who more in depth info:

http://www.proxywhore.com/invboard/index.php?showtopic=204564
(the poster "leia" has done some really good reserach on the geology of the Gulf)