Not much oil has been showing up on SURFACE.

Posted July 28th, 2010 by John Cruz

---

Finally some promising news from the gulf. In the nearly two weeks since a temporary cap stopped BP’s gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, not much oil has been showing up on the surface of the water.

Scientists caution that doesn’t mean the crude is gone. There’s still a lot of it in the Gulf, though no one is sure quite how much or exactly where it is.

“You know it didn’t just disappear,” said Ernst Peebles, a biological oceanographer at the University of South Florida. “We expect that is has been dispersed pretty far by now.”

Jane Lubchenco, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said government and independent scientists have been working hard to figure out where the oil might be, but don’t yet have numbers. Some is still washing up on beaches and in coastal wetlands, but not in the quantities it was a few weeks ago.

Scientists do know that more than 600 miles of coastline has been oiled in the nearly 100 days since the April 20 explosion of the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon.

They estimate that between 107 million gallons and 184 million gallons spewed into the Gulf before the cap stopped the flow July 15. The permanent solution, using a relief well to shoot in mud and cement, is still several weeks away.

So far, officials say they have recovered 34.6 million gallons of oily water using skimmer boats and burned about 11.1 million gallons off the sea surface.

So where’s the rest?

Scientists are worried that much of it has been trapped below the surface after more than 770,000 gallons of chemical dispersant were used to break up the oil a mile deep. They have found evidence of massive clouds of oil suspended in the water.