merh's musings - About those submersibles, do you want to rethink your position?

Human Occupied Vehicle Alvin

WHOI operates the U.S. Navy-owned Deep Submergence Vehicle Alvin for the national oceanographic community. Built in 1964 as one of the world’s first deep-ocean submersibles, Alvin has made more than 4,400 dives. It can reach nearly 63 percent of the global ocean floor.

The sub's most famous exploits include locating a lost hydrogen bomb in the Mediterranean Sea in 1966, exploring the first known hydrothermal vent sites in the 1970s, and surveying the wreck of RMS Titanic in 1986.

Alvin carries two scientists and a pilot as deep as 4,500 meters (about three miles) and each dive lasts six to ten hours. Using six reversible thrusters, Alvin can hover, maneuver in rugged topography, or rest on the sea floor. Diving and surfacing is done by simple gravity and buoyancy—water ballast and expendable steel weights sink the sub, and that extra weight is dropped when the researchers need to rise back up to the surface.

The sub is equipped with still and video cameras, and scientists can also view the environment through three 30-centimeter (12-inch) viewports. Because there is no light in the deep, the submersible must carry quartz iodide and metal halide lights to illuminate the seafloor. Alvin has two robotic arms that can manipulate instruments, and its basket can carry up to 680 kilograms (1,500 pounds) of tools and seafloor samples.

more @ http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=8422

And of course we know that James Cameron has offered the use of his submersibles.

And about that really, really patriotic (yet woefully uninformed) statement "If the US government doesn't have the means or expertise to fight this problem... what makes you think that ANY other nation has the means to help?"

Let's see, there are the Dutch:

Dutch oil spill response team on standby for US oil disaster

Two Dutch companies are on stand-by to help the Americans tackle an oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico. The two companies use huge booms to sweep and suck the oil from the surface of the sea. The US authorities, however, have difficulties with the method they use.

What do the Dutch have that the Americans don’t when it comes to tackling oil spills at sea? “Skimmers,” answers Wierd Koops, chairman of the Dutch organisation for combating oil spills, Spill Response Group Holland.

...

The Americans don’t have spill response vessels with skimmers because their environment regulations do not allow it. With the Dutch method seawater is sucked up with the oil by the skimmer. The oil is stored in the tanker and the superfluous water is pumped overboard. But the water does contain some oil residue, and that is too much according to US environment regulations.

http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/dutch-oi...

And of course, the Norwegians, who are assisting:

Norwegian Scientists Assist US Oil-Spill Combat Efforts

ScienceDaily (May 21, 2010) — SINTEF oil-spill researchers are helping the American authorities to estimate what happens to the oil that is leaking out into the Gulf of Mexico.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/...

I'm glad I found this article, it makes me feel better about the dispersants.

Other nations have had to deal with oil spills. Mexico had the explosion and sinking of a deep water oil rig in 1979. They learned the hard way, just like the Saudis did almost 2 decades ago. Of course, it was a US engineer working for Saudi Arabia's Aramco who came up with the way to contain their massive oil spill 17 years ago, but no one is listening to him.

"No one's listening," says Nick Pozzi, who was an engineer with Saudi Aramco in the Middle East when he says an accident there in 1993 generated a spill far larger than anything the United States has ever seen.

A shrimp boat collects oil with booms in the waters of Chandeleur Sound, La., on May 5. An engineer who witnessed a crude spill in the Persian Gulf in 1993 says BP should use a fleet of empty supertankers to suck crude off the water's surface.

According to Pozzi, that mishap, kept under wraps for close to two decades and first reported by Esquire, dumped nearly 800 million gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf, which would make it more than 70 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.

But remarkably, by employing a fleet of empty supertankers to suck crude off the water's surface, Pozzi's team was not only able to clean up the spill, but also salvage 85 percent of the oil, he says.

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/coul...

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/gulf...

Oh, and according to the State Department:

Late Wednesday evening, the State Department emailed reporters identifying the 13 entities that had offered the U.S. oil spill assistance. They were the governments of Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United Nations.

"These offers include experts in various aspects of oil spill impacts, research and technical expertise, booms, chemical oil dispersants, oil pumps, skimmers, and wildlife treatment," the email read.

"While there is no need right now that the U.S. cannot meet, the U.S. Coast Guard is assessing these offers of assistance to see if there will be something which we will need in the near future."

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/20...

So please, defend the administration all you like but when doing so try to be better informed, m'kay.

And while you are defending them, please explain to me how long the US will go about "assessing" the offers to help and the solutions suggested? How many days do we wait, how much of the Louisiana marshes and bayous and wetlands are destroyed? How long will I have to smell oil instead of the gulf air?

How long will be too long before you admit that US hubris (like your uninformed comment about the US being the most capable) is harming the planet?

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