To confirm, the sea floor is 5000ft below the surface, and the oil reservoir 18000 feet below that. There are some good diagrams at NYT and washington post: ht

To confirm, the sea floor is 5000ft below the surface, and the oil reservoir 18000 feet below that. There are some good diagrams at NYT and washington post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/05/25/GR2010052504985.html?sid=ST2010052903349 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/05... http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/25/us/20100525-topkill-diagram.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/25/us/20100525-to... Funny that the outlet on top of the cap they tried to lower over the leak became clogged with some kind of ice/methane crystal mix. The junk shot/top kill didn't work... as far as I can tell, the mud just sprayed out the top of the broken, bent pipe. Taking blood coagulation as an analogy, there is a complex system of aggregation to form a clot and then strengthen at a breach in an arterial wall - this isn't exactly replicated by what they used in the junk shot, apparently a mixture of mud, golf balls and car tyres. One idea would be to try something else for a junk shot that would actually change the flow characteristics of the oil such as glue, or liquid nitrogen. Mind you, this stuff gets pumped into bottom of the blow out preventer, and the leak is at the top 30ft away. That isn't very much time to change the viscosity of the oil. You would also need a very large volume of this junk shot material... Alternatively, maybe junk shooting with a pile of rare earth magnets could do the trick, assuming the pipe is ferromagnetic. Also there is still the sea-floor to surface pipe attached to the top of the blowout preventer, albeit bent off at an angle. You could thread something through the post breach pipe back towards the main breach and try to plug it that way. The coolest solution I can think of is to fire a copper slug down the throat of the bastard thing with a surface mounted rail gun.