Fintan Dunne:

by Fintan Dunne, 14 August 2010 00:35amEST The Gulf's 'Zombie' well is not dead after all, ex-Admiral Thad Allen admitted in a press briefing today, brushing aside earlier official pronouncements that the well was "static," and optimistic spin that a relief well might never be needed. " We will kill the well ," the national incident commander told journalists, while brandishing a wooden stake and wearing a string of powerful Haitian Ju-Ju beads. [/satire] Allen denied comments that he, BP and the Obama scientific team are now as far up Shit Creek as they have ever been, because they applied a band-aid-like top kill and cement to the interior of the leaking oil pipe, when all signs pointed to oil flowing outside the pipe. " Shit Creek? ,"Allen replied when queried. "Not sure if we have any response teams operating there. But if we're not there now, you can rest assured we soon will be." [/satire] During this week, offic...

by Fintan Dunne, 11 August 2010 11amEST Bad news . An undersea robot video capture by website FloridaOilSpillLaw is showing clouds of raw black crude oil surging out of the sea floor near BP's Gulf well --where only light seeps of gases were seen before: from live feed from Ocean Intervention ROV 1, Aug 11, 2010 03:00 EDT - Source Watch Live Feeds Now Leak monitoring: Rov1 and Rov2 BP has deliberately blurred the video to hamper clear sight of what is going on. That's not a new development. In the last week BP have put software filters on the undersea ROV feeds to change the contrast and blur the picture. Those filters were aimed at hiding modest seeps of methane hydrate or methane. Now with something much bigger to hide, we can expect BP to do what they have done before: shut off the feeds or re-run old video from before this latest leak. What we are witnessing (with difficulty) is the percolation of oil up through the strata in the sea floor. As the oil rises i...

Most of the oil spill from BP's Gulf gusher is still under the sea surface. That means that even satellite images have difficulty presenting us with a true picture of the extent of the oil spread. The University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science has produced a computer model of the likely spread, based on the US Navy Coastal Ocean Model and using the sophisticated maths of turbulent flows in fluid dynamics to understand the evolution of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Their video of the oil spread only runs to June 13th, so you'll have to use your imagination for the last two weeks. The model shows the Florida Keys began to be affected around a month ago, and the Tampa Bay and Sarasota areas with oil about twenty-five miles offshore on June 13. But by then, tendrils of oil were sweeping up Florida's east coast as far as St. Augustine and Jacksonville. Two weeks have elapsed since the final frames of that video. Two weeks of more th...