According to the calendar, summer officially ends this week. But unofficially, it ended over the weekend: BP’s leaking oil well, which cast a gooey black malaise over the last five months, is finally dead.

Crews pumped in cement Friday to plug the well nearly 2.5 miles below the sea floor. The mixture had hardened by Saturday, and a pressure test completed early yesterday confirmed that the plug would hold. [Boston Globe]

Now it time for cleanup, lawsuits, and a whole lot of unanswered questions, including:

Will we drill again?

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This past summer was hot. Russia burned, New York City experienced the hottest summer on record, and residents of the northern hemisphere in general agreed that a cool breeze would be rather welcome. Now more extensive climate data is coming in for 2010, and guess what? Scientists have confirmed that it was hot.

According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the first 8 months of 2010 is the warmest such January-to-August period in climate records stretching back 131 years. This period was nearly 0.7˚C warmer than the average temperature from 1951 to 1980. (NOAA announced roughly the same finding today, using many of the same temperature stations but a different analysis method.) [ScienceNOW]

Researchers say that El Nino conditions in the Pacific Ocean are partly to blame for raising temperatures globally this past year. But, of course, man-made climate change is the larger culprit. This summer the Arctic sea ice shrank very quickly because the ice was already thin; at the end of the summer melt the Arctic ice area was the third smallest on record.

At its smallest extent, on 10 September, 4.76 million sq km (1.84 million sq miles) of Arctic Ocean was covered with ice — more than in 2007 and 2008, but less than in every other year since 1979. [BBC]

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Five months later, BP might finally stop up its leaking well for good this week. As of yesterday, drilling crews had about 50 feet of rock left to drill through to complete their “bottom kill” operation.

Federal officials have said it should take about four days to drill the final stretch of the relief well so that it intersects with the original well. From there, it will probably take a few days to pump in mud and cement and perform tests to determine that the well is fully killed. [Los Angeles Times]

Meanwhile, we continue to hear conflicting reports regarding the whereabouts of the leaked oil, and how much of it persists in the Gulf environment. Last week we heard good news from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which said that not only were microbes consuming much of the oil, but they also weren’t depleting the Gulf of Mexico’s oxygen to dangerously low level, which had been feared.

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Back in May, when executives from BP, Halliburton, and Transocean were hauled in front of Congress to account for the Gulf of Mexico disaster, it was a merry-go-round of blame. With BP publishing online its own internal investigation into the accident this week, it’s more of the same.

BP’s report is far from the definitive ruling on the blowout’s causes, but it may provide some hint of the company’s legal strategy — spreading the blame among itself, rig owner Transocean, and cement contractor Halliburton — as it faces hundreds of lawsuits and possible criminal charges over the spill. Government investigators and congressional panels are looking into the cause as well. [AP]

BP cites eight different places where the accident of April 20 aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig could have been prevented, but points the finger mostly away from itself. One of those problems, it says, was with the workers on the rig.

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Similar populations of seabed-rooted animals separated by 1,500 miles of ice, researchers say, could mean that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was once a trans-Antarctic seaway. This surprising find has also led researchers to wonder if a warming planet could again cause the thick ice sheet to collapse and give way to a swath of open water.

The team, which published their study in Global Change Biology, found similar but separated bryozoans–creatures also called moss animals–in both the Ross and Weddell Seas while conducting the Census of Antarctic Marine Life. Given that bryozoans don’t move all that much, lead author David Barnes suggests that the isolated populations came from the same, connected habitat.

“Because the larvae of these animals sink and this stage of their life is short–and the adult form anchors itself to the sea bed–it’s very unlikely that they would have dispersed the long distances carried by ocean currents,” Barnes said. “Our conclusion is that the colonization of both these regions is a signal that both seas were connected by a trans-Antarctic sea way in the recent past.” [Wired]

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Bluefin tuna–they’re so delicious, they’re on the brink of extinction. The human appetite for this majestic fish has spurred overfishing that has endangered the wild population, so researchers and aquaculture companies are trying to breed the fish in captivity. But so far bluefin tuna have proved very difficult to farm, since it’s impossible to replicate their natural reproductive cycle–researchers think the fish travel hundreds of miles to their traditional spawning grounds. The best results so far have come from an Australian company that is using hormone injections to get the big fish to breed.

Now researchers associated with a European project called Selfdott (an odd acronym for “self-sustained aquaculture and domestication of thunnus thynnus”) say they can successfully raise fish in captivity without using hormones. The New York Times reports that the first batch of fish, raised in floating cages, died after a matter of weeks or months, but researchers still think that with better food and parents more adjusted to captivity, the next group of fish will survive.

“If the results of this research can ultimately be commercialized, it can improve food supplies and contribute to economic growth and employment while also helping to ensure a sustainable management of bluefin tuna,” Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the European Union’s commissioner for research, said this week. [New York Times]

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Earlier this week, DISCOVER brought you oil-cleaning bacteria. Today, we bring you oil-cleaning bots.

This weekend in watery Venice, Italy, MIT scientists will demonstrate a creation called Seaswarm, a fleet of autonomous swimming bots intended to skim the water’s surface; each bot would drag a sort of mesh net to collect the crude sitting there. According to their creators, the machines will be able to find oil on their own and talk to one another to compute the most efficient way to tidy it up.

The Seaswarm robots, which were developed by a team from MIT’s Senseable City Lab, look like a treadmill conveyor belt that’s been attached to an ice cooler. The conveyor belt piece of the system floats on the surface of the ocean. As it turns, the belt propels the robot forward and lifts oil off the water with the help of a nanomaterial that’s engineered to attract oil and repel water [CNN].

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Earlier today we reported on scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution trying to answer the question, “Where’d all the oil in the Gulf go?” (At least some of it is floating around in giant plumes.) In the same issue of the journal Science released this afternoon, another team from Woods Hole tried to answer another pressing ocean question: “Where’d all the plastic in the Atlantic go?”

We’re referring to the great patch of plastic in the North Atlantic Gyre. You might have read the stories in DISCOVER and elsewhere about the more famous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a Texas-sized soup of tiny plastic pieces in the middle of that ocean. Circulating ocean currents create these gyres in several places around the world, and ocean-borne plastic gets trapped. The Woods Hole paper is the result of a two-decade study of the Atlantic patch that produced a surprising result: The amount in total plastic appears to have leveled off—at least according to the data.

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Take Manhattan, turn it into oil and drop it in the Gulf: That’s the size of the submerged oil plume that scientists found near the site of BP’s oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, casting more doubt on those claims that the plumes weren’t so bad, or that most of the oil has been accounted for.

The research was conducted in June during an expedition led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The study, which appears in Science, is the first peer-reviewed data on oil plumes from the leak in the Gulf, and comes from 57,000 direct measurements made during the visit.

The plume, which scientists said came from the busted Gulf well, shows the oil “is persisting for longer periods than we would have expected,” lead researcher Rich Camilli said in a statement issued with the study. “Many people speculated that subsurface oil droplets were being easily biodegraded. Well, we didn’t find that. We found it was still there” [MSNBC].

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Originally scientists believed that one earthquake had set off the deadly tsunami that struck Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga in September of 2009. But two studies to appear tomorrow in Nature argue that instead of one there were really two earthquakes that took place in rapid succession.

For some scientists, the studies clear up odd behavior that didn’t fit with the originally blamed “normal-fault” earthquake in the Pacific Northwest.

“We knew right off the bat that something was weird about this earthquake,” says geophysicist Eric Geist of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif. Geist wasn’t involved in the current studies but has puzzled over the anomalous signs produced by the quake. “This is a very complicated event, and these studies, for me, really helped explain a lot.” [Science News]

John Beaven, lead author of one of the studies, told Nature News the researchers expected the Tongan island to move about three inches to the west as a result of the quake, but GPS showed it had moved nearly a foot east. They also expected the sea bed to drop but instead it rose, a sign of a different kind of “megathrust” quake. A separate study led by Thorne Lay confirmed signs of this alternate type of earthquake from seismic readings.

Though both studies point to two different types of earthquakes, they disagree on which earthquake came first and caused the other. Ronald Burgmann, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in either study says, overall, they both make a good case:

“As in all good chicken-and-egg mysteries,” he says, “there is merit to both views.” [Nature News]

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Image: Mick Finn, GNS Science

The BP oil spill isn’t over. But, as CNN says, we could be at the beginning of the end.

The first part of BP’s “static kill,” in which it used mud to try to plug the leak, appears to have worked well and stemmed the flow of oil. Last night National Incident Commander Thad Allen gave the OK for the second part: pumping concrete. That could begin today.

BP’s “static kill” operation finished ahead of schedule. It took eight hours to fill the 13,000-foot well pipe with heavy drill mud, holding back the oil with its weight. … Now, the column of mud ensures that oil will never be released from the well again, officials say. A permanent cement plug will be put in place later this month [ABC News].

This business of pumping mud probably sounds familiar. That’s because it’s basically the same thing  BP tried to do many weeks ago with its “top kill” maneuver. This time, though, the mud seems to be working, probably because the temporary cap BP put on the leak in July made it easier to smother the oil flow.

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What do you get when you mix oil and dispersants? A mixture that doesn’t seem to be more toxic than oil alone, the EPA said yesterday. Their statement came after a second round of testing eight oil dispersants.

The EPA tested the response of two sensitive Gulf species, the mysid shrimp and a small fish called the inland silverside, which they exposed to mixtures of dispersants plus oil and to oil alone.

The results indicate that the eight dispersants tested are similar to one another based on standard toxicity tests on sensitive aquatic organisms found in the Gulf.  These results confirm that the dispersant used in response to the oil spill in the Gulf, Corexit 9500A, is generally no more or less toxic than the other available alternatives. [EPA statement]

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Just over 100 days after oil started gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, BP says they will embark, later today or tomorrow, on a “static kill” effort that may just seal the leak once and for all.

Perhaps remembering the company’s repeated failures to stanch the flow over these past months, some officials are calling the maneuver only one possible solution. National Incident Commander Thad Allen said:

“Static kill is not the end all, be all.” [The Telegraph]

Still some hope it is; said Darryl Bourgoyne, director of the Petroleum Engineering Research Lab at Louisiana State University:

“It could be the beginning of the end.” [AP]

Temporary fix or permanent plug, here’s how BP will do it:

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Researchers camped on the Greenland ice sheet hit bedrock this week after almost three years of drilling, reaching a depth of 8,000 feet. They hope that the ice they’ve uncovered from some 120,000 years ago, might give them a better understanding of what a warmer future might look like, if Greenland has less ice and the sea level rises.

The team, which is part of the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project, is looking to learn more about carbon dioxide levels during the Eemian period, when global temperatures were over 2-3 degrees Celsius warmer and sea level was about 15 feet higher. They believe these conditions might mirror effects caused by the earth’s changing climate during the next century.

Scientists believe that by the end of the 21st century the planet will experience similar conditions again. Over the Greenland ice sheet, temperatures at the height of the Eemian may have been around 5 degrees Celsius warmer–mirroring the Arctic amplification of modern climate change. . . There are large uncertainties concerning the response of ice sheets to warming air and ocean temperatures. Understanding what happened to the Greenland ice sheet during the Eemian could help constrain projections of future sea level rise. [Nature]

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After floating on plastic for more than 9,000 miles, the crew of the Plastiki arrived in Sydney, Australia today, more than four months after the ship set sail from San Francisco.

The boat of 12,500 bottles was the brainchild of David de Rothschild, who sought a way to bring more of the world’s attention to the problem of discarded plastic bottles and their tendency to wind up in the ocean.

He figured a good way to prove that trash can be effectively reused was to use some of it to build a boat. The Plastiki … is fully recyclable and gets its power from solar panels and windmills. The boat is almost entirely made up of bottles, which are held together with an organic glue made of sugar cane and cashews, but includes other materials too. The mast, for instance, is recycled aluminum irrigation pipe [AP].

The crew of six spent their four-month voyage cramped together in the catamaran’s cabin, taking showers in salt water, and eating dehydrated food. But they didn’t leave all the comforts at home behind. The team’s filmmaker managed to get a Skype connection at sea, which he used to witness the birth of his first child.

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