The Big Spill... Who’s Conning Whom?

Reference Download for in-depth details: the Deepwater Horizon Incident

BP still has not revised their claim that their oil spill is 5000 barrels per day. Experts confidently claim the spill is 12 to 20 times as large. BP refuses to allow experts to use more sensitive equipment to determine the size of the spill. Probable Motive? The larger the spill, the greater the liability and under-representation may save money if nobody gets caught

Pres. Obama claims that BP will pay cleanup costs. They won't. They're limited to $75 million in liability via a US fund. Probable Motive? Trivially obvious!

The New York Times claims there are multiple subsurface oil plumes up to 3 miles wide, 10 miles long and 300 feet deep. AP and others say the largest plume is 1 mile wide. It makes a difference. The higher estimate for a single plume equals 2,000,000,000,000 gallons ... that's 2 Trillion! Possible Motive for NYT misrepresentation? Obvious!

The National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology (NIUST), is operating the only research vessel currently allowed in the spill area. (R/V Pelican) News reports of the subsurface plumes are based on their data

What’s in the “plumes”? Currently unknown. NIUST and the R/V Pelican were diverted from another research mission to track the spill. They are using sensitive underwater detectors … for which the sensitivities and data throughput are undisclosed at this point. Spectroscopy, using lasers, is a highly evolved and sensitive technology which looks through the water and at backscatter, i.e. transmission, reflectance and fluorescence.

However, no one in the news media can claim to have an accurate characterization of the plumes. Are they merely at detectable levels which can be to the part per million range, or relatively dense, i.e. one large blob? In the Deepwater Horizon Incident, I describe how complex the oil spill is and provide a spectrograph of crude oil from the Max Planck Institute. Is NIUST looking for one or all of the various compounds? Again, who knows? Especially since they were diverted from another investigative cruise, they may have an accurate data set that describes the plume, or... be missing significant portions entirely.

Finally, it is physically impossible for one single vessel to accurately characterize this massive spill. The best available data is from the NIUST website. A chart showing sample locations over a period of 2 1/2 weeks is shown below. Shown are 50 sites but … With all due respect to NIUST and the University of Southern Mississippi, they simply do not have sufficient data points to impute continuity to these massive underwater plumes down to 5000 feet deep as reported in the press. Some data points were acquired at speed and a small vessel absolutely cannot use a few sensors to take samples down to 5000 feet while underway.

A major question is … Is R/V Pelican looking at large plumes, or just happen to be hitting many small ones where they sample? In testing jargon, the term is aliasing, where a bad result (picture) can from testing with inadequate sampling.

Of course, NIUST and the University of Southern Mississippi have unfortunately hit on a gold mine here. An obscure experiment conducted by USM and their researchers is suddenly diverted and thrust into the global news. An analogy is the robots on Mars which were theoretically funded for a 90 day life span and had the expeditions last for years. I hope that USM will use discipline and resist the temptation for sensational news releases without good data and then ... allow the news media to extrapolate their data for mutual benefit. Caveats are in order now. What we need desperately at this point is good science and truth. Shown below are the few data points from NIUST's website, which . If there are more, where are the rest that cranked the Times and the rest of the press into hysteria? Please NIUST, accurate, pre-massage data, available publicly, is in order.