7 ms·

Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume

52 points by binarymax 16y ago

houseabsolute 16y ago
Hijacking this to say that the use of the colon in this title and others like it is deeply offensive. It should be: "Study: Microbes Ate BP Oil Deep-Water Plume" It doesn't make any sense for it to be the other way around! Also, hurray that the worst case scenario didn't happen. I will try to remember this the next time I read sky-is-falling articles from commenters at the Oil Drum.
- pohl 16y ago
  s/semicolon/colon/
  - houseabsolute 16y ago
    Corrected, thanks.
- jacobolus 16y ago
  Why do you think it doesn’t make sense? A colon doesn’t necessarily imply the format, “person: person’s statement”, or “term: definition”, but can also be used in titles with the form “title: subtitle” or “title: explanation”. I think you might just be mixing up typical uses of colons in programming language syntax with “correct” usage in English. There’s no ultimately “right” or “wrong” (or, sheesh, “deeply offensive”) usage of punctuation, only conventional or atypical. This particular usage is straight-forward to understand (were you seriously confused?), and quite common in titles and headlines of all sorts. In this case, putting “study” at the end emphasizes the first part of the title: so what?
  - houseabsolute 16y ago
    You wanted a period at the end of that last sentence, not a colon. When one thing says another, for example, a study says a finding, the sayer goes on the left. For example: HouseAbsolute: That's just how it's done. as in a play, or HouseAbsolute said: that's just how it's done. in the less often seen form of this use. That's just how it is done. I dislike it being done the opposite way in titles because I think it probably misleads people into thinking it's an acceptable way to use the punctuation in a typical sentence, where in fact it is backwards from the way it should be in a typical sentence. > or, sheesh, “deeply offensive” Exaggeration: something I use occasionally. (This is the appositive form of the colon, according to Wikipedia.) > There’s no ultimately “right” or “wrong” usage of punctuation. I'm not a strong prescriptive punctuationist, but I do feel we should not use misleading punctuation when we can avoid it or when it doesn't add much. A dash would be fine here, because it's a fairly typical way of showing quotation, although not historically accepted yet. The colon, however, is not.
mcknz 16y ago
The lab that did the study is part of a team that received a $500MM award from BP. I'm sure that's just a coincidence. http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml
- hga 16y ago
  They aren't the only ones studying this; are you aware of anything that contradicts their results? From studies to simple observations that things stopped getting worse when the well was capped? (I for one an extremely tired of this sort of attack, which among other things implies that government funded researchers are a pure as the driven snow. OK, I exaggerate, but it's been well demonstrated in many fields that deviating from the scientific establishment's orthodoxy results in your no longer being able to get government funding for your research.)
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - sz 16y ago
    Check this out: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100819/full/news.2010.420.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100819/full/news.2010.420.ht... http://gulfblog.uga.edu/ http://gulfblog.uga.edu/
    - ABrandt 16y ago
      I believe the article you linked to discusses the same study the OP acknowledges. "These latest findings may initially seem to be at odds with a study published last Thursday in Science by researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution..." "The Woods Hole team used an autonomous robot submarine and a mass spectrometer to detect the plume, but were forced to leave the area in late June...But that was before the well was capped in mid-July. Hazen said that within two weeks of the capping, the plume could not be detected"
  - mcknz 16y ago
    I suppose I should have been less sarcastic -- it's entirely possible that the study is correct, and that would be great news. Science, like any other pursuit, is influenced by money and politics (see EPA under Bush). I don't think I'll ever believe anything BP says ever again, and I'm immediately skeptical of any organization who has a business or funding relationship with them.
plnewman 16y ago
We should turn those microbes loose on the deficit too then.
- hga 16y ago
  I'm afraid that condition already obtains: the microbes were up to the task since the a lot of oil naturally seeps into the Gulf every year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep) and in this case they just had a whole lot more to chow down on. Similarly, there are entities many would rank at the moral level of microbes that are highly evolved to feast on endless quantities of Federal money, borrowed or not. Their answer to the deficit is like the Gulf's microbes: "more, yum!" which is not quite what I think you're looking for.
nwatson 16y ago
This might be the answer to our "depleted ocean fish stock" problem. Feed the bottom of the food chain and we'll have plenty of fish in 5 years.
- hga 16y ago
  With the possible exception of damaged ocean bottoms, I'm not aware of any "depleted ocean fish stock" problem that's a loss of total biomass. What we've seen with e.g. the cod off of New England is the suppression of an apex predictor to the point where many suspect it has been replaced by new apex predators that have prevented its revival to commercially significant numbers. Bad news if you love the taste of cod (as I do, I showed up in the Boston area in its waning days) but not quite the same thing. That said, iron is said to be the limiting micro-nutrient in the oceans (mostly in the context of CO2 geo-engineering) so adding that to an area would be a first step to achieving greater biomass. But it still wouldn't bring back the cod :-(.
  - pyre 16y ago
    To some extent, I find it kind of disheartening that the only reason that you care about over-fishing and the possible extinction of species is how it affects your dinner plate... (i.e. If you didn't like the taste of cod, then you wouldn't care about it at all.)
    - hga 16y ago
      Errr ... I'm not sure where you came to that conclusion from what I said. I follow the cod situation because of "how it affects [my] dinner plate" and because I had a near front row seat to the whole mess for a dozen years, I don't follow the blue-fin? tuna one closely because I don't care all that much about them. And, yeah, I was raised by a fisher and very serious hunter and I often view animals through the lens of their ending up on my dinner plate. None of that has anything to do with how much I might care about "possible extinction", which is something I'm mostly resigned to (e.g. see the passenger pigeon), except ... as far as I know, we're not talking about that with former apex predators. It 's just that their stocks are no longer commercially viable, the theory here being that they are now prey. That might result in them going extinct, but I don't think that's the default assumption. I bet if you wanted to set up a cod fish farm it wouldn't be too difficult to get wild-type breeding stock to start with. No one's done that (as far as I know) since there are other areas with cod and similar fish that haven't seen a population collapse.
sz 16y ago
I found this article a more lucid overview of the situation: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100831/full/467016a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100831/full/467016a.html
- hga 16y ago
  Ah, yes. that's really useful: Like the Woods Hole study it was published in Science, a notorious tool of the industrial establishment ^_^. The "bugs" are of the the order Oceanospirillales. One item I was able to Google said they are facultatively anaerobic (http://www.springerlink.com/content/v46161x20k433868/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/v46161x20k433868/), which would explain how they could feast without serious oxygen depletion and that the latter is not necessarily a good proxy for detecting oil. This further explains how the two studies nicely mesh together (which their PIs agree upon). Woods Hole found oil but normal oxygen levels, LBNL found facultatively anaerobic "bugs" that were eating the oil without serious oxygen consumption. (We can also assume that if these bugs can be cultured and kept viable, the basic metabolic details can be elucidated (assuming they haven't been already) and such in vitro results will further help confirm the LBNL study.) And as it noted this is all months old data, but both studies will help guide further searches for BP oil source oil and these bugs.
83457 16y ago
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129782098 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1297820...
aresant 16y ago
Reading "light sweet Louisiana crude" actually made me hungry. Sounds like a Cajun dish . . .
natch 16y ago
Anyone know if there are any extra dangers from eating shrimp that have been chowing down on these microbes?
robinhowlett 16y ago
But wasn't this the expected outcome by people who actually work in this industry and knew the type of oil being released into the Gulf? From the sources I read, this is what they said would happen. But this didn't sell as well as the catastrophic view point.
chadmalik 16y ago
then why did the BP people need to dump untold gallons of corexit in the gulf? that was idiotic.
- sukuriant 16y ago
  They probably didn't know about these microbe's effectiveness. That, and there was so much publicity about the problems that they had to do ~something~ --- doing nothing would have been taken even worse by the public. Seriously, imagine BP saying, "uh ... yeah, there's not a problem, billions of tiny microbes are going to take care of our accident." People would have mocked them plenty, and their PR guys wouldn't want that.
- hga 16y ago
  Well, it doesn't seem to have hurt this process (note that a large fraction of Corexit is light petroleum distillates, i.e. more chow for these bugs) and at least one source speculated it helped by breaking the oil into small droplets. The more you increase the surface area the more access bacteria can get to it and to the extent its application was effect it likely made a big difference.
Rhapso 16y ago
You know, this makes sense. Bubbles of oil have risen from the ocean bottom before, (no I cannot find a reference, I am disappointed by this, but if humans can cause it then nature can do worse more often) and we have not found any big dead spots in the ocean floor. It makes since either it happens incredibly rarely or the ocean's ecosystem had a natural defense to the problem.
patrickgzill 16y ago
So what happened to the benzene in the crude oil? Did the microbes eat that too?
tocomment 16y ago
Sorry this is probably dumb question but does this imply the oil is mostly cleaned up now?

52 points by binarymax 16y ago

Hijacking this to say that the use of the colon in this title and others like it is deeply offensive. It should be: "Study: Microbes Ate BP Oil Deep-Water Plume" It doesn't make any sense for it to be the other way around! Also, hurray that the worst case scenario didn't happen. I will try to remember this the next time I read sky-is-falling articles from commenters at the Oil Drum.

pohl 16y ago
s/semicolon/colon/
- houseabsolute 16y ago
  Corrected, thanks.
jacobolus 16y ago
Why do you think it doesn’t make sense? A colon doesn’t necessarily imply the format, “person: person’s statement”, or “term: definition”, but can also be used in titles with the form “title: subtitle” or “title: explanation”. I think you might just be mixing up typical uses of colons in programming language syntax with “correct” usage in English. There’s no ultimately “right” or “wrong” (or, sheesh, “deeply offensive”) usage of punctuation, only conventional or atypical. This particular usage is straight-forward to understand (were you seriously confused?), and quite common in titles and headlines of all sorts. In this case, putting “study” at the end emphasizes the first part of the title: so what?
- houseabsolute 16y ago
  You wanted a period at the end of that last sentence, not a colon. When one thing says another, for example, a study says a finding, the sayer goes on the left. For example: HouseAbsolute: That's just how it's done. as in a play, or HouseAbsolute said: that's just how it's done. in the less often seen form of this use. That's just how it is done. I dislike it being done the opposite way in titles because I think it probably misleads people into thinking it's an acceptable way to use the punctuation in a typical sentence, where in fact it is backwards from the way it should be in a typical sentence. > or, sheesh, “deeply offensive” Exaggeration: something I use occasionally. (This is the appositive form of the colon, according to Wikipedia.) > There’s no ultimately “right” or “wrong” usage of punctuation. I'm not a strong prescriptive punctuationist, but I do feel we should not use misleading punctuation when we can avoid it or when it doesn't add much. A dash would be fine here, because it's a fairly typical way of showing quotation, although not historically accepted yet. The colon, however, is not.

mcknz 16y ago

The lab that did the study is part of a team that received a $500MM award from BP. I'm sure that's just a coincidence. http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml

hga 16y ago
They aren't the only ones studying this; are you aware of anything that contradicts their results? From studies to simple observations that things stopped getting worse when the well was capped? (I for one an extremely tired of this sort of attack, which among other things implies that government funded researchers are a pure as the driven snow. OK, I exaggerate, but it's been well demonstrated in many fields that deviating from the scientific establishment's orthodoxy results in your no longer being able to get government funding for your research.)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- sz 16y ago
  Check this out: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100819/full/news.2010.420.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100819/full/news.2010.420.ht... http://gulfblog.uga.edu/ http://gulfblog.uga.edu/
  - ABrandt 16y ago
    I believe the article you linked to discusses the same study the OP acknowledges. "These latest findings may initially seem to be at odds with a study published last Thursday in Science by researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution..." "The Woods Hole team used an autonomous robot submarine and a mass spectrometer to detect the plume, but were forced to leave the area in late June...But that was before the well was capped in mid-July. Hazen said that within two weeks of the capping, the plume could not be detected"
- mcknz 16y ago
  I suppose I should have been less sarcastic -- it's entirely possible that the study is correct, and that would be great news. Science, like any other pursuit, is influenced by money and politics (see EPA under Bush). I don't think I'll ever believe anything BP says ever again, and I'm immediately skeptical of any organization who has a business or funding relationship with them.

plnewman 16y ago

We should turn those microbes loose on the deficit too then.

hga 16y ago
I'm afraid that condition already obtains: the microbes were up to the task since the a lot of oil naturally seeps into the Gulf every year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep) and in this case they just had a whole lot more to chow down on. Similarly, there are entities many would rank at the moral level of microbes that are highly evolved to feast on endless quantities of Federal money, borrowed or not. Their answer to the deficit is like the Gulf's microbes: "more, yum!" which is not quite what I think you're looking for.

nwatson 16y ago

This might be the answer to our "depleted ocean fish stock" problem. Feed the bottom of the food chain and we'll have plenty of fish in 5 years.

hga 16y ago
With the possible exception of damaged ocean bottoms, I'm not aware of any "depleted ocean fish stock" problem that's a loss of total biomass. What we've seen with e.g. the cod off of New England is the suppression of an apex predictor to the point where many suspect it has been replaced by new apex predators that have prevented its revival to commercially significant numbers. Bad news if you love the taste of cod (as I do, I showed up in the Boston area in its waning days) but not quite the same thing. That said, iron is said to be the limiting micro-nutrient in the oceans (mostly in the context of CO2 geo-engineering) so adding that to an area would be a first step to achieving greater biomass. But it still wouldn't bring back the cod :-(.
- pyre 16y ago
  To some extent, I find it kind of disheartening that the only reason that you care about over-fishing and the possible extinction of species is how it affects your dinner plate... (i.e. If you didn't like the taste of cod, then you wouldn't care about it at all.)
  - hga 16y ago
    Errr ... I'm not sure where you came to that conclusion from what I said. I follow the cod situation because of "how it affects [my] dinner plate" and because I had a near front row seat to the whole mess for a dozen years, I don't follow the blue-fin? tuna one closely because I don't care all that much about them. And, yeah, I was raised by a fisher and very serious hunter and I often view animals through the lens of their ending up on my dinner plate. None of that has anything to do with how much I might care about "possible extinction", which is something I'm mostly resigned to (e.g. see the passenger pigeon), except ... as far as I know, we're not talking about that with former apex predators. It 's just that their stocks are no longer commercially viable, the theory here being that they are now prey. That might result in them going extinct, but I don't think that's the default assumption. I bet if you wanted to set up a cod fish farm it wouldn't be too difficult to get wild-type breeding stock to start with. No one's done that (as far as I know) since there are other areas with cod and similar fish that haven't seen a population collapse.

sz 16y ago

I found this article a more lucid overview of the situation: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100831/full/467016a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100831/full/467016a.html

hga 16y ago
Ah, yes. that's really useful: Like the Woods Hole study it was published in Science, a notorious tool of the industrial establishment ^_^. The "bugs" are of the the order Oceanospirillales. One item I was able to Google said they are facultatively anaerobic (http://www.springerlink.com/content/v46161x20k433868/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/v46161x20k433868/), which would explain how they could feast without serious oxygen depletion and that the latter is not necessarily a good proxy for detecting oil. This further explains how the two studies nicely mesh together (which their PIs agree upon). Woods Hole found oil but normal oxygen levels, LBNL found facultatively anaerobic "bugs" that were eating the oil without serious oxygen consumption. (We can also assume that if these bugs can be cultured and kept viable, the basic metabolic details can be elucidated (assuming they haven't been already) and such in vitro results will further help confirm the LBNL study.) And as it noted this is all months old data, but both studies will help guide further searches for BP oil source oil and these bugs.

83457 16y ago

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129782098 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1297820...

aresant 16y ago

Reading "light sweet Louisiana crude" actually made me hungry. Sounds like a Cajun dish . . .

natch 16y ago

Anyone know if there are any extra dangers from eating shrimp that have been chowing down on these microbes?

robinhowlett 16y ago

But wasn't this the expected outcome by people who actually work in this industry and knew the type of oil being released into the Gulf? From the sources I read, this is what they said would happen. But this didn't sell as well as the catastrophic view point.

chadmalik 16y ago

then why did the BP people need to dump untold gallons of corexit in the gulf? that was idiotic.

sukuriant 16y ago
They probably didn't know about these microbe's effectiveness. That, and there was so much publicity about the problems that they had to do ~something~ --- doing nothing would have been taken even worse by the public. Seriously, imagine BP saying, "uh ... yeah, there's not a problem, billions of tiny microbes are going to take care of our accident." People would have mocked them plenty, and their PR guys wouldn't want that.
hga 16y ago
Well, it doesn't seem to have hurt this process (note that a large fraction of Corexit is light petroleum distillates, i.e. more chow for these bugs) and at least one source speculated it helped by breaking the oil into small droplets. The more you increase the surface area the more access bacteria can get to it and to the extent its application was effect it likely made a big difference.

Rhapso 16y ago

You know, this makes sense. Bubbles of oil have risen from the ocean bottom before, (no I cannot find a reference, I am disappointed by this, but if humans can cause it then nature can do worse more often) and we have not found any big dead spots in the ocean floor. It makes since either it happens incredibly rarely or the ocean's ecosystem had a natural defense to the problem.

patrickgzill 16y ago

So what happened to the benzene in the crude oil? Did the microbes eat that too?

tocomment 16y ago

Sorry this is probably dumb question but does this imply the oil is mostly cleaned up now?