Ever since the explosion of April 20 aboard the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform, oil has been oozing into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of at least 5,000 barrels per day. And now, adding to the woes is a rain of chemicals meant to control the spill.
BP and the U.S. Coast Guard are dumping large amounts of "dispersants" both on the surface and underwater. Dispersants are surfactants that break oil down into small droplets that sink into the water. They are dumping almost a third of the world’s supply of dispersants!
Emergency workers dropped 100,000 gallons of the stuff into the Gulf. But what precisely is being dumped is surprisingly being kept a secret!
However, an agency did manage to identify one product currently being used, called Corexit, which includes 2-butoxyethanol, a "compound associated with headaches, vomiting and reproductive problems at high doses." To take the sting off one deadly bite, yet another bite!
Serious questions remain about the wisdom of using dispersants to treat spills. The possibility of photoenhanced toxicity and particulate/oil droplet phase exposure is generally not considered. A number of laboratory studies have indicated toxicity due to PAH increases significantly (from 12 to 50,000 times) for sensitive species in exposures conducted under ultraviolet light (representative of natural sunlight), compared to those conducted under the more traditional laboratory conditions of fluorescent lights.
Toxicity aside, what dispersants do is to remove the oil from the surface and send it deep into the waters where it stays undisturbed for long, causing untold misery to many species.
Yet another reason to phase out fossil fuels and shift to renewables, would you say?
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