Scientists frustrated at Obama administration's slow response to Gulf oil spill and Alaska's own Rick Steiner says that oil plumes beneath the surface should have been anticipated.

Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope.

The scientists assert that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have been slow to investigate the magnitude of the spill and the damage it is causing in the deep ocean. They are especially concerned about getting a better handle on problems that may be occurring from large plumes of oil droplets that appear to be spreading beneath the ocean surface.

The scientists point out that in the month since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the government has failed to make public a single test result on water from the deep ocean. And the scientists say the administration has been too reluctant to demand an accurate analysis of how many gallons of oil are flowing into the sea from the gushing oil well.

“It seems baffling that we don’t know how much oil is being spilled,” Sylvia Earle, a famed oceanographer, said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “It seems baffling that we don’t know where the oil is in the water column.”

I voted for President Obama, and have continued to support him even though he has not yet ended the two wars draining our country's resources at an alarming rate and left many issues that I hoped he would address untouched.

However I am absolutely disappointed in the response to this huge ecological disaster. If I did not know better I would swear that George Bush and his merry band of Keystone Kops was still in charge.

And leave it up to a scientist from Alaska to point out that these huge plumes of oil just beneath the surface were something that the government should have been able to predict.

Rick Steiner, a marine biologist and a veteran of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, assailed NOAA in an interview, declaring that it had been derelict in analyzing conditions beneath the sea.

Mr. Steiner said the likelihood of extensive undersea plumes of oil droplets should have been anticipated from the moment the spill began, given that such an effect from deepwater blowouts had been predicted in the scientific literature for more than a decade, and confirmed in a test off the coast of Norway. An extensive sampling program to map and characterize those plumes should have been put in place from the first days of the spill, he said.

“A vast ecosystem is being exposed to contaminants right now, and nobody’s watching it,” Mr. Steiner said. “That seems to me like a catastrophic failure on the part of NOAA.”

Mr. Steiner, long critical of offshore drilling, has fought past battles involving NOAA, including one in which he was stripped of a small university grant financed by the agency. He later resigned from the University of Alaska at Anchorage and now consults worldwide on oil-spill prevention and response.

Two things that Alaskans know all about are corrupt politicians and oil spills. I worry that what is happening in the gulf involves both of our areas of expertise.

Update: As I was upstairs eating my breakfast it occurred to me that  the end of this post makes it look like I am claiming that President Obama is corrupt, and I certainly am not.  However I DO believe that some of the officials working for FEMA and NOAA need to be scrutinized more carefully, and I would really like to know how BP gets to have the Coast Guard forbid reporters from accessing the beaches that may be affected by this spill.

I also agree with Robert Redford that the time is now for getting serious about clean energy and to move this country away from its dependence on fossil fuels.