Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume
reuters.com
reuters.com
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml
(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.)
"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"
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.
I agree we shouldn't throw out good science because of the funding, but we should at least be aware of the source of funding.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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/), 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.
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 :-(.
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.
From the sources I read, this is what they said would happen. But this didn't sell as well as the catastrophic view point.