Gulf Coast oil spill could eclipse Exxon Valdez

earth has become mankind's titanic

wow i guess i originally misunderstood the enormity of this. seriously disturbing.

i really dont get how nuking it is supposed to patch it up.

is it supposed to set all the oil on fire/destroy it?

^amazing

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8657100.stm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpU1NK994Dc

  Quote

BP is responsible for this leak. BP will be paying the bill.

Good, but still scary as hell.

bp footing the bill for something they as of yet have no idea how to control makes me feel so much safer

maybe this is a result of the cleavage day that got organised on facebook to see if extra millions of people showed cleavage, earthquakes would happen.

I'm starting to smell something outside...

I'm convinced that humans are the worst thing that have ever happened to this planet. If I wasn't one I'd say kill us all to save the planet lol

Fuck that sucks about the smell... crazy to imagine fresh outside air smelling like a gas station

the planet will be fine, we are only gonna end up killing ourselves and some animals. everything else will come back later. its pretty hard to ruin a multi trillion tonne lump of rock.

  On 5/3/2010 at 11:13 AM, karmakramer said:

Fuck that sucks about the smell... crazy to imagine fresh outside air smelling like a gas station

It's not to that point just yet, but when the wind hits in the right direction you can definitely catch a whiff of it. I can't imagine how it smells at the coast, I'm 90 miles away

I wonder if the oil will reach up the Mississippi. Probably not as the river flows southward

  On 5/3/2010 at 11:14 AM, messiaen said:

the planet will be fine, we are only gonna end up killing ourselves and some animals. everything else will come back later. its pretty hard to ruin a multi trillion tonne lump of rock.

Oh I agree, I was just stating that humans are pretty high up on the Earth's list of "Things I Wish Were Never Created"

  On 5/3/2010 at 2:43 AM, 42Orange said:

i really dont get how nuking it is supposed to patch it up.

 

is it supposed to set all the oil on fire/destroy it?

i think its not supposed to sort the oil out but move the suken oil rig which is apparently covering the hole which would make the job of somehow plugging it more difficult. but it seems a bit extreme to me to use a nuke.

this disaster is absolutely terrifying and feels almost too horrible and big for me to fully comprehend sometimes with no real solution in sight, and what makes it even more scary is that people who are in power to sort this out seem to feel the same.

"At BP's Houston offices, dozens of engineers and technicians were cloistered on the third floor, working 12-hour shifts round-the-clock to come up with a solution.

"It's probably easier to fly in space than do some of this," Charlie Holt, BP's drilling and completion operations manager in the Gulf of Mexico, said Sunday.

Everything engineers have tried so far has failed."

quote from here.

I think the idea with a nuke is you'd blow the hole closed by stressing the surrounding mantle. Its a pretty deep hole (that rig could drill 30,000ft below the sea floor), and a sufficiently large explosion could probably disrupt the earths crust enough to close it or at least cause enough deformations in the wells shaft to reduce the output. Looking at some of the engineering comments that suggest the explosion was caused by how much pressure is down there I really question if digging a relief well will work. Who is to say that rig won't explode too!

Jesus fuck I can't believe the magnitude of this disaster. I hadn't heard too much about it on the news (as has been said) so thanks for everyone's contributions in this thread for making me realize the severity of this thing.

Dammit.

What's that image with the red streaks about though?

that is the oil slick from miles above it....

  On 4/30/2010 at 9:33 PM, Atop said:

me as well....

 

we have all of the tech for non-oil fueled everything but we need a replacement for plastic....

 

I am sure it is out there.....

 

BP may be the cause of this spill but the source is OPEC....

 

 

  On 5/3/2010 at 2:54 AM, karmakramer said:

^amazing

whats the deal with this pic?

  On 5/3/2010 at 10:39 PM, Atop said:

that is the oil slick from miles above it....

But the red...is it digitally enhanced to show the oil (painted red)?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8658344.stm

interviewer seems like a prick

  On 5/3/2010 at 11:03 PM, sidewinder said:

  On 5/3/2010 at 10:39 PM, Atop said:

that is the oil slick from miles above it....

But the red...is it digitally enhanced to show the oil (painted red)?

Boom?

my best friend's dad was on a tanker nearby that answered the mayday...supposedly they couldnt progress to the tanker bc there was a 700 ft flame going straight into the air and the surrounding waters were boiling. he hasnt been sleeping well...supposedly he saw some really fucked up things...

  On 5/4/2010 at 3:31 AM, Scrambled Ears said:

he hasnt been sleeping well...supposedly he saw some really fucked up things...

Like what?

lol...I'm a glass man myself, but there's another reason to use plastic - it removes the risk of explosions on bottling lines.

Yeah I was thinking the same thing, not alot of news on it at all.

I'm of the opinion that we need something like this for humanity to change so I'm both apprehensive and curious about what's going to happen.

I don't think that it will cause a holocaust, but it will likely do more than enough damage. "Expert" predictions shouldn't be underestimated, we had alot of those before Katrina.