Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study | Reuters

Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON | Tue Aug 24, 2010 5:25pm EDT

 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Manhattan-sized plume of oil spewed deep into the Gulf of Mexico by BP's broken Macondo well has been consumed by a newly discovered fast-eating species of microbes, scientists reported on Tuesday. 
[Newly discovered? Are you fucking kidding me? That shit was invented and deliberately released.]
 The micro-organisms were apparently stimulated by the massive oil spill that began in April, and they degraded the hydrocarbons so efficiently that the plume is now undetectable, said Terry Hazen of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
These so-called proteobacteria -- Hazen calls them "bugs" -- have adapted to the cold deep water where the big BP plume was observed and are able to biodegrade hydrocarbons much more quickly than expected, without significantly depleting oxygen as most known oil-depleting bacteria do.
Oxygen is essential to the survival of commercially important fish and shellfish; a seasonal low-oxygen "dead zone" forms most summers in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by farm chemical run-off that flows down the Mississippi River.
Hydrocarbons in the crude oil from the BP spill actually stimulated the new microbes' ability to degrade them in cold water, Hazen and his colleagues wrote in research published on Tuesday in the journal Science.
In part, Hazen said, this is because these new "bugs" have adjusted over millions of years to seek out any petroleum they can find at the depths where they live, which coincides with the depth of the previously observed plume, roughly 3000 feet. At that depth, water temperature is approximately 41 degrees F (5 degrees C).
FEASTING ON HYDROCARBONS
Long before humans drilled for oil, natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico have put out the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill each year, Hazen said.
Another factor was the consistency of the oil that came from the Macondo wellhead: light sweet Louisiana crude, an easily digestible substance for bacteria, and it was dispersed into tiny droplets, which also makes it more biodegradable.
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, which confirmed the existence of the oil plume and said micro-organisms did not seem to be biodegrading it very quickly.
However, Hazen and Rich Camilli of Woods Hole both said on Tuesday that the studies complement each other.
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, when Hurricane Alex threatened. At that time, they figured the plume was likely to remain for some time.
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, but there was a phenomenon called marine snow that indicated microbes had been feasting on hydrocarbons.
As of Tuesday, there was no sign of the plume, Hazen said.
That doesn't mean there is no oil left from the 4.9 million barrels of crude that spilled into the Gulf after the April 20 blowout at BP's Deepwater Horizon rig. The U.S. government estimated on August 4 that 50 percent of the BP oil is gone from the Gulf and the rest is rapidly degrading.

SOHO Hotshots

 

Caption: In a paper appearing in the 18 May issue of Science magazine, M�kinen et al. claim to have measured the total amount of water ice present in a comet. As Comet LINEAR was on what may have been its maiden voyage through the inner parts of our solar system, the nucleus was blown to pieces and all of its water ice evaporated due to the heat from the Sun.

As water evaporates from a comet, it is split into its components of oxygen and hydrogen by radiation from the Sun. The hydrogen atoms "glow" in yet more radiation originating from our star, and this glow can be observed by the SWAN instrument on board SOHO.

Primarily designed to study the interaction of the solar wind with the interstellar breeze of hydrogen, the instrument dubbed Solar Wind Anisotropies scans the sky is also a unique observer of comets. Similar observations are impossible from the ground, due to the absorption in the atmosphere, glare from the Sun during daytime, and a hydrogen cloud surrounding the Earth itself.

The total amount of water vapour observed by SWAN from 25 May to 12 August 2000 is estimated at 3.3 million tonnes. Only about 1% of this was left on 6 August, when one observation by the Hubble Space Telescope of the dying comet's fragments gave an estimate of the total volume of the fragments. Combining the two numbers give a remarkably low value for the density - about 15 kilograms per cubic meters, compared with 917 kg/m³ for familiar non-porous ice. Even allowing for an equal amount of dust grains, 30 kg/m³ is far less than the 500 kg/m³ often assumed by comet scientists. For this reason, the estimated water ice content is expected to raise some controversy. Assuming a homogenous composition of the whole comet, the nucleus had a diameter of about 750 metres at the beginning of SWAN's observation series.

 

The passage in bold italic above illustrates just one of the giant red flags waving at astronogers. Their model, combined with observations, suggest that this comet had a density of 15kg/m³. Clearly this is idiotic, it's more than an order of magnitude different from expectations, more than an order of magnitude from the assumptions, and yet it is treated as gospel. Now astronogers will be scrambling to explain all these "puffball" comets. Clearly the "dirty snow" model is wrong. Comets flare electrically, they are rocks, not "ices" and "volatiles".

 

The Provocateur State:

 

The requirement of an ever-escalating level of social violence to meet the political and economic needs of the insatiable "anti-terrorist complex" is the essence of the new US militarism.

What is now openly billed as "permanent war" ultimately serves the geo-political ends of social control in the interests of US corporate domination, much as the anti-communist crusade of the now-exhausted Cold War did.

Back in 2002, following the trauma of 9-11, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted there would be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large. How could he be so sure of that? Perhaps because these attacks would be instigated on the order of the Honorable Mr. Rumsfeld. According to Los Angeles Times military analyst William Arkin, writing Oct. 27, 2002, Rumsfeld set out to create a secret army, "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" network that would "bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception," to stir the pot of spiraling global violence.

According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organization--the "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)"--would actually carry out secret missions designed to provoke terrorist groups into committing violent acts. The P2OG, a 100-member, so-called "counter-terrorist" organization with a $100-million-a-year budget, would ostensibly target "terrorist leaders," but according to P2OG documents procured by Arkin, would in fact carry out missions designed to "stimulate reactions" among "terrorist groups"--which, according to the Defense Secretary's logic, would subsequently expose them to "counter-attack" by the good guys. In other words, the plan is to execute secret military operations (assassinations, sabotage, "deception") which would intentionally result in terrorist attacks on innocent people, including Americans--essentially, to "combat terrorism" by causing it!

This notion is currently being applied to the problem of the Iraqi "insurgency," it seems. According to a May 1, 2005 report by Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine, two of the top US advisers to Iraqi paramilitary commandos fighting the insurgents are veterans of US counterinsurgency operations in Latin America. Loaning credence to recent media speculation about the "Salvadorization" of Iraq, the report notes that one adviser currently in Iraq is James Steele, who led a team of 55 US Army Special Forces advisers in El Salvador in the 1980s. Maass writes that these advisors "trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses."

The current senior US adviser at the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which Maass writes "has operational control over the commandos," is former top US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official Steve Casteel, who worked "alongside local forces" in the US-sponsored "Drug War" in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, "where he was involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin cocaine cartel."

The US "drug war" in Latin America also serves as a cover for ongoing counterinsurgency, employing terrorist methods to achieve two aims: one, actually combating genuine insurgency; two, the ratcheting up of a "strategy of tension," heightened social violence designed to induce fear among the citizenry and the subsequent call for greater "security."

This was the essence, for example, of Operation Gladio, a decades-long covert campaign of provocateur-style terrorism and deceit. The ostensible purpose of Gladio, officially launched as a covert NATO program in 1952, was to establish a clandestine network of "stay-behind" teams which would organize armed resistance and sabotage in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. But the network actually took a far more proactive role. Directed by US/NATO intelligence services of the West against their own populations, Operation Gladio led to possibly hundreds of innocent people being killed or maimed in "terrorist" attacks which were then blamed on "leftist subversives" or other political opponents. The most notorious such attack was the 1980 bombing of the train station at Bologna, which left 85 dead. Initially blamed on left-wing radicals, the blast was revealed upon investigation to be the work of an ultra-right network linked to the Italy's Gladio team; four Italian neo-fascists were eventually convicted of the crime.

The purpose was again twofold: to demonize designated enemies (the "communists") and to frighten the public into supporting ever-increasing powers for the national security state. It appears the Pentagon has been implementing Gladio-style operations for quite some time--possibly including 9-11. A stretch? Maybe not.

Witness the US Joint Chiefs discussion of "Operation Northwoods" back in 1962, a plan to blow up U.S. "assets"--including U.S. citizens--in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. Later, US Army Field Manual 30-31B, entitled "Stability Operations Intelligence - Special Fields," dated March 18, 1970 and signed by Gen. William C Westmoreland, promoted terrorist attacks (and the planting of false evidence) in public places which were then to be blamed on "communists" and "socialists." It called for the execution of terrorist attacks throughout Western Europe, carried out through a network of covert US/NATO armies, in order to convince European governments of "the communist threat."

What is striking is that during this period the primary source for US government info on the Russian "threat" was coming from the Gehlen Organization, Hitlers eastern front intelligence apparatus, which in the aftermath of World War II had cut a deal with the CIA's Allen Dulles and worked out of Fort Hunt, just outside Washington DC, before being relocated back to Munich. Headed up by super-spy Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen, the Org's "special operations" expertise was heeded, financed and well-protected by U.S. tax dollars well into the 1970's. Could the Gehlen Org have had an influence in the production of FM 30-31B?

According to FM 30-31B,

"there may be times when Host Country Governments show passivity or indecision in the face of communist subversion and according to the interpretation of the US secret services do not react with sufficient effectiveness. Most often such situations come about when the revolutionaries temporarily renounce the use of force and thus hope to gain an advantage, as the leaders of the host country wrongly consider the situation to be secure. US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger."

The U.S. Army now claims the document was a Russian forgery. Journalist Allan Francovich in his BBC documentation on Gladio and US/NATO "special operations" terrorism, asked Ray Cline, CIA deputy director from 1962 to 1966, if he believed FM 30-31B was for real and he replied: "Well, I suspect it is an authentic document. I don't doubt it. I never saw it but it's the kind of special forces military operations that are described," to be implemented at the discretion of the president and Defense Department on the "appropriate occasion."

It could be that in Iraq--and elsewhere around the world--the "appropriate occasion" has arrived. Bush's war on terrorism could be the ultimate manifestation of the provocateur state; carrying out of clandestine "executive actions" and "special operations" directed against populations, including our own, who are truly ignorant of the real "enemy" in the face of the ever-present manufactured one, traumatized by strategic terror designed to engender fear and acquiescence to further "security measures"--thereby enriching the military, police agencies, and munitions and nuclear business enterprises.