The invisible spill

The new official flow rate of oil from the spill caused by collapse of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico at 60,000 barrels a day means there's enough oil to flow for two to four years!!

But hopefully the leak rate will fall sharply over time once the natural gas in the reservoir is exhausted. That is the driving force.

The oil spill is a good time to imagine what’s spilling into the atmosphere and oceans in an invisible manner since decades – imagine the damage from carbon dioxide being added to the atmosphere at a rate of about 1,000 tons a second!

A new paper in the journal Science, by researchers at the University of Queensland and University of North Carolina talk of large impacts on marine life and ocean dynamics caused by the ongoing buildup of carbon dioxide, both by warming the planet and changing ocean chemistry.

Ocean systems are being driven toward conditions not seen for millions of years, with an associated risk of fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation. The impacts of anthropogenic climate change include decreased ocean productivity, altered food web dynamics, reduced abundance of habitat-forming species, shifting species distributions, and a greater incidence of disease among marine life.

While we see the oil spill, we cannot see the ‘carbon spill’ and hence remain unmindful of the irreversible change we have induced.