BP uses dispersants to keep oil spill off of the surface, and away from the news cameras, but now it is under the surface and virtually impossible to reach. BP has now taken a huge problem and made it much, much worse.

From MSNBC:

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”

The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and appears to be the first scientific expedition to gather extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.

Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.

So did you get that?  These scientists are calculating that the amount of oil gushing from the broken pipe is between five to eighteen times the amount that the government is calculating because the government is tracking it using satellite images which can only see the surface oil.  But BP used dispersants to sink the oil out of sight of the satellite so that it cannot be seen as easily and they can then lie about how much is gushing into the gulf.

Assholes!

And it looks like they are doing this right under the noses of the EPA.

The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.

The scientists involved in the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans, are not certain why that would be. They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected directly into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly.

BP said on Saturday at a briefing in Robert, La., that it had resumed undersea application of dispersants, after winning approval to do so the day before from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Look I don't know if the EPA is complicit in this or not, but I have a hard time believing that BP, who manufactures the dispersants being used on this spill, did not realize that it would do not more than hide the problem under the surface of the water rather than to help break it up and therefore make it easier to clean.

I think it is well past time that the Federal government took charge and stopped relying on data provided by BP and satellite images and got a handle on this before it becomes an even bigger catastrophe.  If that is even possible at this point.

However I saw Bill Nye on MSNBC this morning saying that nobody has ever tried to clean a spill this size that is stuck beneath the surface, and he essentially had no idea how to go about it. In other words this thing might be FUBAR'd and there will be virtually nothing that can get his oil out of the water until it washes up on beaches all along the coast, or settles to the ocean floor smothering to death millions of essential plants and animals.

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say "Fuck you BP"!  And the people that support you.