Whatever you call it, the BP oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is still there, and I will almost certainly finish my PhD before it's stopped. Now that's a sobering thought. When even gaming comics take notice, you know it's big.
If you only watch one video about the oil spill, I'd recommend Rachel Maddock's historical perspective. "What they've gotten technologically advanced at is drilling deeper. Congratulations, now the thing you can't stop is a mile underwater!"
All outrage aside, though, the solution game interests me more than the blame game. This nation--this world--is full of innovative experimental engineers. If BP's in-house folks are striking out, maybe someone from the outside could come up with something?
And so today I blog a SQUID with no tentacles, no suckers, no snapping beak. It is the Super Quick Undersea Incident Device (hee), and it's a simple tube of plastic invented by one Steve Dvorak (no, not that Dvorak). It looks extremely clever, at least from the perspective of someone not particularly experienced in 5000'-engineering.
Discovery did a nice writeup on the concept. In brief: the flexible plastic sleeve channels oil to a small area of the surface, where recovery efforts can be concentrated. Simple. Straightforward.
The other advantage to this proposed solution is that it will contain
gases and keep the oil from moving toward the coast. And repair
operations can go on, such as directing remotely operated subs, while
the sleeve is covering the well.
BP hasn't jumped on it, but they may yet!
Yes, I cling to my optimism as tenaciously as oil to bird feathers. And on that note, yeah, I'm deliberately not linking to horribly sad pictures of dying marine life. They're easy enough to find, but crying over them doesn't really help anyone.
(Thanks to Deep-Sea News, Tom Hayden and the Environmental Journalism class for many of the news links.)
