how the NOAA determined most of the oil in the gulf is gone.
 

the report’s authors started with an estimate from another government scientific team: how much oil spewed from the out-of-control BP well before it was capped on July 15. That calculation was itself the product of a drawn-out controversy in which the government was accused of deliberately playing down the size of the spill in the early days.

Starting with the latest estimate, 4.9 million barrels plus or minus 10 percent, a scientific team led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration incorporated various assumptions about the nature of the oil and the fates it could have encountered after hitting the water. (NOAA is the same agency that devised the early, now-discredited estimate that the well was leaking only 5,000 barrels a day, one reason some people distrust the new report.)

The firmest number in the report is that 17 percent of the oil emerging from the wellhead was captured by various containment devices. From there, the numbers got less certain.

The report estimated, for instance, that 25 percent of the oil either evaporated from the hot ocean surface or dissolved in the water into individual molecules of hydrocarbon. Some scientists, Dr. Joye among them, said they doubted that more than 10 percent or 15 percent of the BP oil had disappeared in this way.

Bill Lehr, a NOAA scientist in Seattle who was involved in creating the model, said the figure was based on both direct measurement and past scientific research about the fate of spilled oil. Efforts to refine the estimate, and the rest of the model, are continuing, he said.

Dr. Lehr said one difficulty was figuring out how much oil had dispersed naturally into tiny droplets. The accepted methodology for making that calculation is based on shallow spills. In this one, the oil shot out of the broken well at high speed a mile below the ocean surface, and some of it dispersed in the deep ocean. A new formula had to be created to take that factor into account.

When all the math was done, the government team concluded that about 16 percent of the oil had dispersed naturally. “We think it’s sound theory, but it’s new,” Dr. Lehr said. “You could say it’s an experiment in that respect. You do the best you can with what you’ve got.”

Similarly, the report offered calculations about how much oil had been burned or skimmed from the ocean surface, how much had been chemically dispersed, and so forth.

By a process of elimination, the researchers concluded that only 26 percent of the oil had come ashore or was still in the water in a form that could, in principle, do additional shoreline damage. And much of that was breaking down quickly in the warm waters of the gulf, the report said.

Of course, that 26 percent equals more than 53 million gallons of oil, five times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

“One way of looking at it is to say that 26 percent of the world’s largest oil spill is still out there,” said Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation for the National Audubon Society. “And that is a lot of oil.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/us/05oil.html?src=mv

If it's down to 50 million gallons from 200 million already it should all be gone in another month.

Wow, that's amazing. The oil magically vanishes faster than it spewed out. What an amazing feat of nature.


"Dispersed" does not = Gone.
"Dispersed" = Still there in small droplets.
4.9 million barrels doesn't just vanish. It took three months to pump that much into the ocean, it certainly is not "gone" all by itself in less than a month.

Lies. $.02

But you're only counting nature and forgetting about SuperFletch :upsidedow

Millions upon millions of barrels of oil spills naturally into the oceans every single year, fucking dumb ass hippies.

Doesn't mean it magically disappears all by itself. Dumb ass consumers.

Lol ok buddy... l2chemistry

Lol ok back at ya... physics.

Let's all try a little garage experiment...

take a bucket, fill it 3/4 up with water, fill the rest with motor oil. Let's see how long it takes to "go away" all by itself. Then in another bucket, let's do the same but spray some dispersant on it and see how long it takes to have nice clean clear drinking water again.

Oceans are not buckets of city water. HERP DERP

Okay then, make it salt water. Throw a dead fish or two in there.

You are a horrible troll
http://www.isa.org/InTechTemplate.cf...ontentID=76955

From your own link source:

Does that sound to you like it's "going away"? :1orglaugh

And also from my link source...
:1orglaugh

Hey AMP I found a picture of you
http://knowyourmeme.com/i/000/046/12...jpg?1270937748

There are 650 Quadrillion gallons of water in the Gulf of Mexico :)

That's not me.

The volume is irrelevant. Oil does not dissolve in water. Period.

Significant portion does not = all.

What is a "significant portion"? I think one piece of chicken for dinner is a "significant portion".

Well it will just take the experiment a bit longer then.

I wonder how many buckets actually exist? :)

The other day I caught a Spanish Mackerel fishing off a gulf coast pier and I have to say it tasted a bit oily.

:1orglaugh

A decent percentage.

This has been happening for thousands of years, by your estimation the entire coast of California would be nothing but oil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Oil_Point_seep_field

i took your mom fishing in the gulf yesterday and all she came back with was a red snapper.... :1orglaugh



.

that's an inaccurate experiment. there are too many microbes and other organisms living in seawater. there are a lot of other factors too.


not to say that i'm instantly going to believe what i hear on the news. it would be nice if that oil just went away, though..

Okay, obviously that idea was far too complex for GFY, so let me try again:

We can make a reasonably accurate scale model of the Earth's oceans. This is done all the time for tsunami modeling and other various studies. We can get the most widely accepted estimates of the volume of water that is in the oceans, and simply reduce it to scale. Then, we'll put an equal ratio of actual seawater to crude oil mixture within it, made from the actual Gulf of Mexico seawater sampling, and crude from the actual well. This will be done in one of the top labs in the country, not the garage, where in a controlled environment, an approximation of area sealife can be introduced and mock current & wave action can be applied in accordance to the scale as well as other random events that can be duplicated within the laboratory environment such as rain, wind, surface burning, atmospheric pressures, etc. This should only run a few billion.


There. More GFY appropriate.

Are you going to recruit the inhabitants of Lilliput to do the scale model clean-up?

Volume is relevant.

We are talking about 1 gallon of oil for every 13 BILLION gallons of water. That would be something like 0.29 picoliters of oil in your gallon of water. That is 0.00029 nanoliters :1orglaugh

Okay, so it's measurable then. Perfect. Now we just need investors.

Just remember, the NOAA scientists are the same ones who, for over a month said the flow rate from the well was around 5K barrels a day. Then an outside scientist spent about ten minutes studying a choppy 30 second video clip and determined the flow to be around 70K barrels a day, which is close to what the agreed upon number is now which is around 60K/day.

So the NOAA was only off by what? 1000% or so?

NOAA has a track record of downplaying or underestimating this thing from the start. Not sure why to believe them now.

Measuring .29 picoliters of oil may not be easy considering a single drop of water is 67,000,000 picoliters.

Hence, the investors.

amp's trolling abilities have really gone down hill.

Thanks, how much do I owe you for the life analysis consultation? $500/hr ?

You just need to scale up then to a bigger bucket.

2½million litres in an Olympic swimming pool, will that make it any easier?

OK, 1 teardrop of oil in 350 Olympic size pools.

Is that a metric teardrop or an imperial one?

i should of stated that there would be no math in this thread.

!

Yes, 'no-math' clauses must be stated up front.

So let's sum this up. The major news outlets will broadcast the idea that the oil "goes away naturally" for a few months citing magical microbes and "Doc" from Back To The Future, Limbaugh will be redeemed in the eyes of his lemmings, public becomes numb and stops giving a shit as usual, Hayward walks away with $17 mil, Gulf Coast stays fucked and covered in oil for decades, "Drill Baby, Drill" returns, and BP goes merrily on their way contracting with Libya or whoever the fuck else they make deals with, while the price at the pump continues to rise and nothing else changes. That about it?

Let's bag, burn & bury this whole fucking story so we can get back to being gluttonous assholes already. Where the fuck is Palin? Isn't she due for another appearance with more pearls of wisdom?

I am sure they are exaggerating. I don't think the timing of this announcement, 100 days before the next election, and the stories out of Iraq of soldiers packing up their shit and the timing of the upcoming "Main Street" bailout (forgiving a large part of people's home loans) are a coincidence...

here's how i would summarize.

the oil is getting cleared out of the gulf, how much is currently gone and how is beside the point. by now focusing on the fact that it is getting cleared out we can continue with the positive, moving forward and on process.

the gulf is half full not half empty amigo!

:)

Lol you are such a fucking drama queen. :1orglaugh:1orglaugh

The Gulf coast isnt COVERED in OIL and will probably be much cleaner in the long run than it was before the spill with all the attention and work being done there.

Hate to tell you but Limbaugh is pretty good about fact checking, he of course twists it to his views but his facts about the spill were pretty correct. Go figure.

Oil is a futures market you dumb ass, summertime vacations drive up prices more than any fucking oil spill.

Republicans are owned by the oil companies, so they will fall all over themselves to shout louder than everybody else "the oil is gone, problem solved", to make their masters happy.

And it's the south, mostly republican, so let them claim what they want, they are the ones who will be paying the long term costs anyway.

If republicans want to suck greasy oilcompany dick, let em. It's the south. Let them swallow benzene.

Limbaugh is a drug addict racist.

i should of also stated that there will be no bipartisan political spins in this thread.

!

A filthy stinking rich "drug addicted racist" whose legacy will live long after you are dust in the wind. Kinda puts it in perspective doesnt it.

HERP DERP lol you dont think Democrats own oil companies? God you are a fucking retarded shill.

That depends on who's perspective you're talking about.
Limbaugh's perspective, oh yeah, I'm sure he's full of himself.
My perspective, I don't give a fuck about Limbaugh.
Your perspective, you think being 'filthy stinking rich' is important.

Its ok I know you dont understand the concept of wealth. :thumbsup

How much is left on that bridge card?