Cross your fingers — the final static kill procedure begins tomorrow.  Meanwhile, those who don’t live near the Gulf are wondering where the oil in the ocean went.  (To some Americans, if you can’t see it, it must not exist).  I’ve even read columnists sarcastically wonder why everyone was so worried in the first place, and whether the media stories were overblown.   Sadly, the oil is still mostly where BP put it, in the ocean.  Some of it is in the sand on beaches.  If the oil is in the water column, or the sea bed soil, it’s still there, mixed with dispersants.  Like CO2 in the air — you can’t necessarily see it, but you can see its effects on wildlife and in some cases, the marshes are still full of oil, as is the sand.

Oil is elbow-deep under the sand in some areas.  (See photo of this at right)

BP is still defending the unprecedented amount of dispersants used to break up the oil and they are going to great pains to defend dumping poisons in the ocean.  They are getting a lot of facetime on TV too, unfortunately.  The EPA then released a new study saying that dispersants mixed with oil are no more toxic than the oil itself.  The problem with that, if you believe it, is that the oil is very toxic and is still killing wildlife every day. I just read yesterday that frustrated people are cleaning hermit crabs with Q-tips.  The EPA states:

“All eight dispersants were found to be less toxic than the dispersant-oil mixture to both test species. Louisiana Sweet Crude Oil was more toxic to mysid shrimp than the eight dispersants when tested alone. Oil alone had similar toxicity to mysid shrimp as the dispersant-oil mixtures, with exception of the mixture of Nokomis 3-AA and oil, which was found to be more toxic than oil.”

The flow rate estimate was released today and the media is telling us the oil released started out at 62,000 barrels a day, and then later went down to 53,000 barrels a day.  Wait a minute — why can they tell us this now, when the oil flow has stopped, but somehow they couldn’t do it when it was actually measurable?

All in all, we are told 4.9 million barrels of oil flowed into the Gulf.  Many people think it was twice that, or three times or even more.

However much is still there, it is “hovering”.

A Greenwire report published in the The Times put it this way:

That dispersed oil now hovers, diluted in the water column, posing a challenge for scientists to track and measure the subsea plumes. Mapping the long-term effects of the nearly 2 million gallons of dispersant used by BP PLC may well be equally difficult, given the array of unanswered questions that surround the products’ rapid breakdown of oil droplets and their chronic toxicity.

In other words, while dispersants may have helped spare [...]