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Comment by tcskeptic | Hacker News Reader

I'm not trying to minimize the oil spill when I say this, but I have found myself thinking about how wrong my perceptions of "natural" are of late. I was recently in LA at the Tarpits. Seems so industrial and polluted -- yet totally natural.

Similarly, in the gulf, while the gushing leak is clearly manmade, the "Stuff" coming out(Other than the wicked dispersant, the "Mud", and the junk shot) is entirely natural, unrefined, unprocessed. A part of the earth. It is just contrary to my instincts to think about oil this way. It seems so chemical, and processed. I wonder, other than "seeps" if there have been large, catastrophic oil escapes via natural means (Earthquakes, etc.)? I wonder what the largest was?

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This is why thinking about things in terms of "natural" vs "manmade" is only a crutch. It is a reasonably good rule of thumb that if something is sold in the supermarket and was grown and minimally processed, it is good for you, while if it was heavily processed it isn't. But is just a rule of thumb.

For example, while the science is still up in the air on this as far as I know, it may turn out that Vitamin D supplements are healthier than getting Vitamin D from sunshine, because that same sunshine causes skin cancer.

On the other hand, because of selection bias, there is a pretty good chance that something that has been around for several thousand or million years as part of a natural process is well adapted to the ecology of our planet. The natural processes that disrupted things wildly were either incorporated into a new dynamic equilibrium (oxygen producing cyanobacteria) or died off a long time ago. Oil wells that go miles into the planet's crust underneath miles of deep water are neither of these things.

I think the problem isn't the substance, or its natural/synthetic origin. The oceans can deal with oil. The issue is the abnormal concentration.

Perhaps an analog would be oxygen: mammals like you positively thrive on the stuff, but do look up "oxygen toxicity" if you accidentally increase its partial pressure to a few times ambient.

You're right about concentration/volume. The marine ecosystem deals with a certain amount of hydrocarbons. It's when there's more than it can deal with that we get problems.

Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara are studying some of the most readily accessible natural seeps in the world right off of campus:

http://convergence.ucsb.edu/article/goo-and-gas

http://seeps.geol.ucsb.edu/

http://convergence.ucsb.edu/news/ucsb-scientists-document-fa...

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