by Willie Bear

Created on: July 17, 2010   Last Updated: November 26, 2011

First of all, I want to condemn BP for causing this environmental disaster. The laundry list of shortcuts and profit-driven drilling methods that lacked human and environmental safety is abhorrent! 

But on with my view on this article - I think that this doomsday scenario would make an interesting novel or movie, but as far as reality is concerned, it just does not make sense. The main article by Terrence Aym has, what looks like, an impressive list of sources. However, the correlations and/or conclusions either inferred or implied are not always accurate. As a geologist for many years, and one with a knowledge of Gulf of Mexico geology in particular, many things mentioned or implied just do not add up. For instance, the LPTM or Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum was caused by mass volcanism during a period in earth's history where numerous volcanoes erupted for long stretches of time and resulted in extreme concentrations of numerous greenhouse-type gases being emitted thus causing 'natural' global warming. The LPTM was not caused by a "methane bubble".

The sea floor world-wide contains vast deposits of methane hydrates - which basically consist of methane frozen in a matrix of sediments such as silts, sands, and clay particles. The Gulf of Mexico sea-floor contains methane-hydrates in vast quantities which are relatively stable due to the temperature and pressure at great depths. The author of the original article claims that the Gulf is an "unstable area", geologically speaking. In fact, the Gulf is a relatively stable area compared to many other geologic settings within the American tectonic plates.

I'm not sure which scientists are "increasingly concerned the same series of catastrophic events that led to worldwide death back then may be happening again-and no known technology can stop it." Certainly none of the scientists that I know! The mass extinction episodes cited were not caused by oil spills, or methane bubbles. Having said this, if vast expanses of methane hydrates do become unstable and "erupt", that would definitely lead to major environmental impacts, depending on the methane 'load' that is released.

Methane is often associated with oil fields, although the amounts of methane in different geologic oil reserves is highly variable. The fact that methane was detected from the drilling of the two relief wells is no surprise given the fact that we know this oil-field contains a relatively large amount of methane as observed in the well that exploded back in April. 

The so-called "gash" in the sea-floor in the vicinity of the BP well that is reportedly still spewing oil and gas into the sea, is not documented. The Gulf, and the remainder of the worlds oceans and seas, contain numerous rifts, ridges, spreading-centers, underwater mountains and valleys, and a host of other topographic entities. These features have been around and have been dynamically changing - albeit sometimes extremely slowly, ever since the Earth was created some 4.5 billion years ago!

Anyway, enough doomsday bashing. Let's just hope that this new cap stifles the flow of more contaminants into the environment and that one of the relief wells can permanently seal this blown-out well so that BP can really focus on spending $$$ to clean up the mess and compensate the myriad of people and businesses that have been devastated by this disaster.

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