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Do you know which countries produce the most crude oil? That’s the subject of today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. You are challenged to name the 12 nations that produce the most oil (not the ones that have or export the most) in three minutes. There was only one left when I ran out of time. Link
Andrew Evans of National Geographic is on a photo expedition to the Tristan da Cunha island group in the South Atlantic. He expected to get beautiful pictures of wildlife and their natural habitat, but fate took another turn. A cargo ship crossing from Brazil to Singapore crashed on the rocks of Nightingale Island, and began to spill the 800 tons of fuel it was carrying.
The captain and all crew escaped the vessel, but by last Saturday the ship had begun to break up in the heavy surf. The oil slick had spread around the island and then out to sea in the direction of Inaccessible Island.
Our ship, the MV National Geographic Explorer arrived at Tristan Da Cunha yesterday and sailed to Nightingale Island this morning, as intended on our original itinerary with Lindblad Expeditions. Instead of mere bird watching, we were met with the disturbing sight of penguins and seals coated in sticky black oil.
Nightingale Island is home to some 20,000 of the endangered sub-species of Northern Rockhopper Penguin. Sadly, these are the birds that were hit the hardest—thousands are expected to die from the effects of the oil spill. While this spill is relatively minor in comparison to so many in the world today, it represents a major calamity for the fragile birdlife on pristine Nightingale Island and a heavy blow to the small group of islanders of nearby Tristan da Cunha.
Although hundreds of the rockhopper penguins were collected to be cleaned, many more hundreds are left covered with oil, along with seal pups and other wildlife. Read Evans’ report and see more pictures at National Geographic’s Digital Nomad blog. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
(Image credit: Andrew Evans/National Geographic)
The April 20, 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico reminded me that thirty-seven years ago I drew cartoons for the Sierra Club that pointed to the dangers of drilling for oil in Gulf waters. Back then I was a monthly contributor to the editorial page of The Sierra Club Bulletin, which was later renamed Sierra magazine. Recently I dug into a box of my cartoons from 1973-74 and located five on the subject of oil drilling in the Gulf. Two of the drawings were published in the magazine, and three had been held in reserve and never printed.
The danger of oil spills in the Gulf is not new!
In 1937, when Pure Oil company planted a fixed oil drilling platform in fourteen feet of water off Louisiana’s Calcaisieu Parish, they took the first baby steps that resulted in a growing assault on the Gulf, with increasingly sophisticated fixed and floating oil drilling platforms deployed in ever deeper waters. By now, according to the July 7 AP Report, there are 27,800 abandoned wells and 10,500 active wells in the Gulf.
The Florida Everglades and adjacent tracts of land to the north called The Big Cypress are extraordinarily sensitive to environmental threat. This July, the United Nations added the Everglades to its list of World Heritage sites in danger, citing the large amounts of water diverted to cities. It had been on the list from 1993 to 2007 for the same reason and then taken off.
For more than 70 years there has been a tug-of-war in the Gulf, especially in Florida, between oil companies and land developers on the one hand, and groups representing the collective concerns of environmentalists, fishing and hunting interests, and the tourist industry on the other. In 1973, the Gulf shoreline was under added pressure from oil drilling and land development interests after President Nixon declared Operation Independence in October. The Operation was a call to action and plan for developing energy resources at home to offset the effects of a recent oil embargo by OPEC nations. By December, 147 new drilling tracts were offered for leasehold sale in the Gulf of Mexico as part of a five-year plan to aid American self-sufficiency. Seventeen of those tracts were located about 40 miles west of Tampa and St. Petersburg.
That year, the danger from oil drilling directly off the West coast of Florida was noted in the above cartoon.
In several editorial cartoons in late 1973, I suggested that while oil companies were eying the tempting drilling tracts opening up in the Gulf, they still needed to persuade the public that they intended to do no harm. I showed how drilling platforms could be disguised to look like something they were not. Such an idea is not entirely unthinkable, since in some urban areas today one sees cell phone repeater “trees” decorated to look like actual trees, with fake pine-tree-like branches.
The above cartoon, showing drilling platforms disguised as bizarrely-outsized islands sporting a single palm tree, was published in the December 1973 issue of the Sierra Club Bulletin.
Another version of the same concept, shown above in color, was drawn but not published.
For decades, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups have lobbied aggressively and occasionally successfully to stall or halt oil-drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico. The cartoon, published in The Sierra Club Bulletin in May 1974, shows a gasoline tank-filling hose as an elusive and restless sea monster off the Florida coast.
In 1972-4, the Club focused its attention on an area in Florida known as Big Cypress, directly north of the Everglades, one to two feet higher in elevation, that is the source of fifty-six percent of its fresh water. In 1972, Florida Governor Reubin Askew had appealed to the U.S. government to save and acquire the Big Cypress Preserve. The Club’s lobbying efforts aided in the successful establishment of the Big Cypress Thicket Preserve in Texas, and Big Cypress preserve in Florida in 1974.
Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.
In 1970, BP collaborated with boardgame maker PrintBox of Scotland to come up with a game that is eerily prescient of the Gulf incident. The game BP Offshore Oil Strike didn’t catch on, and thus became somewhat of a collector’s item. BLDGBLOG got its hands on one:
With this "exciting board game for all the family," released in 1970, BP delivered all "the thrills of drilling, the hazards and rewards as you bring in your own…" Bring in your own "Offshore Petro-Dollars," that is.
The game’s internal monetary supply comes in denominations of $200,000, $500,000, $1,000,000, $2,000,000, $10,000,000, and $20,000,000—which is good because you need to earn a lot of it: "The 1st player to make $120,000,000 cash is regarded as the winner."
After all, it’s "a race to find and develop the riches ‘neath the seabed," where no deepwater is beyond the horizon of possible drilling.
Accumulating this fortune, however, is not without its difficulties. Each player has "Hazard" cards to deal with; here are some of the risks BP thought to include:
—"Accident. Rig shuts down while replacement of key personnel takes place. Miss one turn."
—"Fire breaks out. Pay $2,500,000 for repairs."
—"Hit High-Pressure Gas—Rig Damaged. Specialists called in."
—"Blow-Out! Rig Damaged. Repairs cost $2,000,000"
—"Drill pipe breaks. Pay $500,000 for replacement."
—"Strike High Pressure Gas. Platform Destroyed."
—"Blow-Out! Rig Damaged. Oil Slick Clean-Up costs. Pay $1,000,000."
Lots more pic at BLDGBLOG: Link
The pictures we see of birds and other wildlife affected by the Gulf oil spill are heartbreaking. What should we do about them? Some wildlife experts advocate euthanizing instead of cleaning individual birds.
“Kill, don’t clean,” recommends Silvia Gaus, a biologist at NationalPark Wattenmeer (Wadden Sea National Park) in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Unfortunately, despite some short-term success in cleaning birds and releasing them into the wild, few, if any, have a chance of surviving even for a few months, reports Ms Gaus, who has worked as a biologist for 20 years.
“According to serious studies, the middle-term survival rate of oil-soaked birds is under 1 percent,” Ms Gaus explained. “We, therefore, oppose cleaning birds.”
Blogger and evolutionary biologist GrrlScientist took a closer look at those serious studies and found the survival rate of oiled birds depends on a number of factors, and can be as high as 100% among some populations. She advocates making the effort to clean and release birds.
I disagree with Ms Gaus’s gloomy policy. Because all people use oil or oil-related products in some form, I maintain that it is both ethical and responsible to try to save as many oiled birds and other wildlife as we can. Some wildlife management professionals argue that cleaning oiled birds isn’t worth the monetary cost and effort since little or no impact can be made on a species level. But actually, we don’t know this to be true. Additionally, I ask you; what amount of money and effort is too much, and who should be making those decisions anyway? Further, what do we, as scientists and as a society, gain by trying to save these unfortunate animals? Certainly, I think it is imperative to develop our technology to the best level possible so we can use it to help all birds, whether their populations are doing fine or they are threatened or endangered, so we are capable of helping them in the sad event that they are impacted by an oil spill. This requires that we continually refine and improve our techniques and equipment to do the job properly.
There is much more information on previous spills and bird survival rates at Living the Scientific Life. What do you think? Should we leave oiled birds to their fate, euthanize them, or wash and rehabilitate them one by one? Link
(Image credit: Paul Buck/EPA)
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is getting progressively worse, as the media reports that the latest effort to stop it, the "top kill" method, is not working. So far, an estimated five million gallons of crude oil have leaked into the gulf.
Asylum has put together five interesting ways to understand just how much oil this actually is: enough to fly a full Boeing 777 jet around the world, six times, for example.
Let’s do some simple math. There are 42 gallons per barrel of oil. That means 5 million gallons of crude oil equals about 119,047 barrels. From those barrels we can create 56,666 gallons of actual gasoline. So what can you do with nearly 57,000 gallons of gasoline? For starters, you can hop into a Hummer and drive from New York City all the way to Los Angeles. And back. About 100 times.
Link – via mentalfloss
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by nmiller.
Photo: Steadfast TV, courtesy of National Geographic Channel
Yesterday, we blogged about photographs of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill hitting the Louisiana shorelines and undoubtedly you’ve heard about Big Oil pointing fingers and casting blames at each other about whose fault it was.
But what happened when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded? National Geographic Channel has the exclusive, never-before-seen photographs and video footage of the rig ablaze and the efforts of the US Coast Guards and first responders to put out the flame and rescue the survivors.
Over at Neatorama Spotlight, we have a few photos of the sinking rig that will leave you breathless: Link – Thanks Julie Frazier and Minjae Ormes!
What would happen if a tropical storm hit the oil floating in the Gulf? It depends on the storm, and exactly where it meets the oil.
Much depends on the angle at which the storm crosses the slick. In the Northern Hemisphere, hurricanes rotate counterclockwise, with the largest storm surge occurring where the winds blow in the direction the storm as a whole is traveling—that’s in front of the eye and off to the right. (Meteorologists worry over a hurricane’s dangerous “right-front quadrant.”) So if a powerful storm approached the slick from the southwest, say, its most potent winds would push the oil forward, instead of sweeping it off to the side and out of the storm’s path. If the storm then plowed into the Gulf Coast, you’d expect an oily landfall.
The BP oil spill that’s filling the news as well as the Gulf of Mexico is big. But understanding just how big has been difficult, until now. A new tool, created by Paul Rademacher, allows you to understand exactly how big the spill is, as well as overlay it over any other map to compare it to the size of familiar distances. You can see here that it is twice as wide as the distance between Washington, DC and Baltimore!
Link – via houstonist
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by nmiller.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
