What’s the News: After running aground last week on a remote island off the coast of South Africa, a freighter has leaked over 800 tons of fuel oil, coating an estimated 20,000 already-endangered penguins. “The scene at Nightingale [Island] is dreadful as there is an oil slick around the entire island,” said Tristan Conservation Officer Trevor Glass said in a statement. But even worse, authorities fear that the rats from the soybean-toting ship will swim to the island and destroy the bird population.

What’s the Context:

• The MS Oliva was traveling from Brazil to Singapore when it ran aground last Wednesday for unknown reasons, breaking up on Saturday and pouring some of its 1,500 tons of heavy oil into the surrounding waters.
• There are over 200,000 Northern Rockhopper Penguins (nearly half the world’s population of this species) on the Tristan Da Cunha archipelago, which includes Nightingale Island. This cleanup job is especially difficult because these islands lie 1,700 miles from the closest land, South Africa, making it much more difficult to launch a significant response—not good for birds who’re already listed on the international endangered list.
• The biggest danger to the penguins would be if if any rats make it from the ship to the island, as they can feast on baby birds unhindered. Like the birds from William Stolzenburg’s Rat Island—a gripping account of the challenges in ridding rats from infested islands—these remote birds “evolved in a world devoid of land-bound mammals,” and so are pretty much defenseless against rats.
• 80beats has covered oil spills in the past, including last year’s BP spill and its effects on wildlife.
• In that spill, the pelican was the oil-covered bird species that symbolized environmental disaster.

The Future Holds: Though a salvage tug left Cape Town, South Africa, last Thursday, the earliest it will arrive to help remove fuel is this Wednesday. With little to salvage, authorities say that cleanup is now the main task at hand. As Jay Holcomb, the director emeritus of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, told the New York Times, “Many of the birds have been oiled for over a week, which limits their chances of survival.”

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Arjan Haverkamp

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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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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In early July we brought you news of the Great Sea Turtle Relocation–an ambitious plan dreamed up by conservationists to scoop up some 70,000 sea turtle eggs from Gulf Coast beaches, to prevent the hatchlings from crawling straight into oil-fouled waters. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted that the plan carried considerable risks to the unborn turtles, but said it was the best chance of preventing the die-off an entire generation.

Now the update: Over the past week, the plan has gone into action, and baby turtles are now swimming free in the Atlantic Ocean. But some experts question whether the launched turtles have a chance.

On Alabama and Florida beaches workers are carefully digging up nests, marking the eggs with “this end up” symbols, and packing them in styrofoam coolers for the truck ride to a Kennedy Space Center warehouse. The eggs belong mostly to threatened loggerheads, along with some endangered green, leatherback, and Kemp’s ridley turtles.

Check out a photo gallery of the turtle rearing and release operations after the jump.

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Do you hear that? That’s the sound of oil not gushing uncontrollably into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s leak, for the first time in nearly three months. BP is still running tests on the new cap the company installed this week, but at least for now there’s some for slight optimism.

The flow stopped yesterday afternoon, and BP video feed of its leak site showed quiet containment.

The view on Thursday afternoon was eerily tranquil, just the slate blue of the deep interspersed with small white particles floating across the screen. Though the exact amount of the oil that has poured out of the well may never be known, it was suddenly and for the first time a fixed amount. The disaster was, for a little while at least, finite [The New York Times].

The task now is a pressure test, which will take place over two days. Lower pressure inside the well would mean the surrounding rocks are leaking a little; high pressure would indicate the well is sealed off.

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The eye of Hurricane Alex steered hundreds of miles clear of the center of the BP oil spill, but it still managed to hold up cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico.

Alex was by no means a whopper, reaching category 2 status at its height and blowing with winds just over 100 miles per hour. While mild by hurricane standards, it meant that only the largest ships, like those doing the relief well drilling and oil capturing, could stay out at sea.

Hundreds of shrimp boats that were converted into oil skimmers now sit in port, and the tall waves tossed boom that was holding back the oil onto the beaches of Grand Isle, La. The beaches are now too dangerous even for cleanup crews. “Those booms, they don’t seem like they were designed for this kind of wave action,” said Matthew Slavich, an oyster fisherman hired by BP for cleanup efforts. He was out on the open water trying to lay boom today, but didn’t stay long [ABC News].

Besides hampering cleanup efforts, Alex also negated some of the work crews already did.

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Hurricane predictors warned us this season could be a bad one, and could bring unknown consequences for the ongoing BP oil spill. We may soon find out what those consequences are, as Tropical Storm Alex moves toward the Gulf and may reach hurricane status today.

More Delays

Supposing Alex reaches the spill, it might not be all bad.

Waves churned up by Alex — as high as 12 feet — could help break up the patches of oil scattered across the sea. The higher-than-normal winds that radiate far from the storm also could help the crude evaporate faster. “The oil isn’t in one solid sheet. It’s all broken up into patches anyway. It will actually work to break those patches down,” said Piers Chapman, chairman of the oceanography department at Texas A&M University [AP].

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Perhaps it’s a disservice to continue calling the oil pouring into the Gulf a spill. “Spill” makes it hard to conceptualize the estimated 60,000 barrels of oil per day blasting up from a well more than 5,000 feet below sea level. It also makes it difficult to picture how, as BP estimates, as much as 40 percent of the material “spilling” is methane gas. That methane has been largely overshadowed by the horror of oil-soaked pelicans and tar balls washing ashore, but now a survey, completed on Monday, has measured how the methane has spread.

What’s the problem with methane? The microbes that feed off it. It can create “methane seep ecosystems”–shallow food chains that eat crude oil and dissolved methane and in the process consume all available oxygen, leaving nothing for other marine life forms. Bacteria eat the methane and “ice worms” (so-called because they live around ice-like methane hydrate) eat bacteria, but nothing else eats these worms. This creates a “dead zone.”

So in short [an abundance of creatures that use] methane for food and oxygen to “breathe” will create areas where only bacteria and a few other non-life sustaining organisms can live. All others die. [San Francisco Chronicle]

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Brown pelicans smothered by BP’s oil spill may be the symbols of sadness for the disaster in the Gulf, but they are, of course, far from the only animals affected. Marine scientists are watching other species for signs of danger.

Whales

Late last week, scientists spotted the first dead whale seen in the Gulf since the leak began gushing oil in April. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found a 25-foot-long sperm whale washed up, and now it is testing the sea creature for cause of death.

“While it is impossible to confirm whether exposure to oil was the cause of death, NOAA is reviewing whether factors such as ship strikes and entanglement can be eliminated,” the agency said. Samples collected from this carcass will be stored until the Pisces returns to port on July 2, or possibly if another boat is sent to meet the Pisces. Full analysis of the samples will take several weeks [New Orleans Times-Picayune].

Manatees

So far, it at least appears that manatees have been spared toxic exposure to the ever-growing oil spill. However, a science team hunkered down at Dauphin Island in Alabama—in the path of the oil—say their luck may not hold.

Until recently, biologists believed that manatees rarely ventured west of peninsular Florida, where, so far, no oil has appeared. But in 2007, Ruth Carmichael, who leads the Dauphin Island team, began documenting a relatively large summer migration of manatees to Mobile Bay, Ala. — leading them directly into and through the path of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak. From a couple of dozen to as many as 100 come to Mobile Bay for the summer, out of a total North American population of 5,000, she said [The New York Times].

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Here’s what’s new in the Gulf of Mexico:

1. Saw stuck.

When we left the BP oil spill yesterday, the “top kill” had failed and the “top cap” plan—cutting the pipe at a strategic location and then placing a containment dome on top—was commencing. But like every other BP attempt to stop the leak, the dome effort hit a snag.

The attempt bogged down overnight as a special diamond-wire saw snagged in the pipe. The work has stalled as BP tries two old logger tricks: changing the angle of the pipe to let the saw get through and, if that doesn’t work, bringing the saw to the surface to replace the blade [Christian Science Monitor].

What’s more, even if the saw gets free and BP successfully cuts the riser, the already-gushing flow of oil will increase by at least 20 percent between the time engineers finish the cut and the time they install the cap. Whether BP can install the cap, or instead a looser-fitting shell that would capture less of the oil, depends on how smoothly the company makes the final cut. Getting the saw stuck isn’t a good sign.

2. Criminal investigation.

The word is official now: Attorney General Eric Holder says the United States government will be opening a criminal investigation into the spill.

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At this point the question “now what?” has reached a sort of repetitive absurdity in the Gulf of Mexico. With BP having failed to stop its oil leak with robots and failed with containment domes and failed with the “top kill” maneuver, the company has decided it’s going to try the dome approach again.

On Monday, engineers positioned submarine robots that will try to shear off a collapsed 21-inch riser pipe with a razorlike wire studded with bits of industrial diamonds. If that is achieved, officials will need at least a couple of days to position a domelike cap over the blowout preventer [The New  York Times].

The cap is called the lower marine riser package (LMRP), and—stop me if you’ve heard this one—it’s never been tested at the depth of 5,000 feet, so BP has no idea whether it will work. The previous version of the containment dome had the same goal: establishing a seal on the seal and piping the oil up to a tanker on the surface. But because of buildup on the dome, that first attempt in early May was unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, the disastrous numbers just get worse. The oil spill is now worse than the Exxon Valdez and increasing in size by the day. Yesterday wind patterns from the south threatened to carry more oil toward Mississippi and Alabama. The fishing ban has been extended to nearly 62,000 square miles, or about a quarter of the Gulf.

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After nearly forty days of wandering in the wilderness of failure and frustration, is this the time that BP finally closes off its oil leak?

There’s a glimmer of optimism in the Gulf of Mexico right now, as the “top kill” appears to have stopped the flow of oil. But with everything that’s happened so far, people are watching nervously and holding off on any celebration until we know the leak is sealed at last.

“They’ve been able to stabilize the wellhead, they’re pumping mud down it. They’ve stopped the hydrocarbons from coming up,” said Coast Guard chief Thad Allen, who is coordinating the US government’s battle against the oil spill. He told local radio WWL First News that BP “had some success overnight” but cautioned the British energy giant was “in a period of kind of wait and see right now where they see how the well stabilizes” [Discovery News].

The likelihood of long-term success grows with the passing hours, though, for the sake of caution, it may be tomorrow before BP declares victory on this. It took a lot of pumping heavy mud just to get to this point:

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This week BP will try one more time to stop its massive leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The “top kill” plan that was supposed to go into action on Sunday will now commence on Wednesday, the company says.

The process will involve pumping heavy fluids down two three-inch lines placed inside the wellhead. If successful, the fluids will temporarily stop the oil rush, which would then allow operators to seal the opening with cement. The wellhead, officials say, will never be used again for oil drilling [Christian Science Monitor].

Just like the containment dome, though, a top kill has never been attempted on a leak gushing so far below the surface of the water—5,000 feet. But with BP’s other attempts ending in failure, this looks like the best shot the company has to stop the flow in a short term.

As BP prepares this operation, the simmering anger at the company has seeped up to the higher levels of the U.S. government. Rear Admiral Mary Landry, who has been coordinating the Coast Guard’s response with BP, finally started to sound annoyed with the company’s actions—or lack thereof—as 65 miles of American shorelines have now been hit by oil, coating pelicans in Louisiana that were just removed from the endangered species list six months ago.

Landry also criticized BP for allowing some equipment that could aid in efforts to block or clean up the spreading oil slick to sit unused, even as oil is washing up onto the Gulf Coast. “There is really no excuse for not having constant activity,” Landry said [New Orleans Times-Picayune].

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By now, more than 650,000 gallons of chemical dispersant have gone into the Gulf of Mexico to try to break up the oil. But after giving BP the go-ahead to use the chemical, and to inject it undersea, the Environmental Protection Agency changed course yesterday and demanded that BP switch to a less toxic dispersant. From the EPA statement:

While the dispersant BP has been using is on the Agency’s approved list, BP is using this dispersant in unprecedented volumes and, last week, began using it underwater at the source of the leak – a procedure that has never been tried before. Because of its use in unprecedented volumes and because much is unknown about the underwater use of dispersants, EPA wants to ensure BP is using the least toxic product authorized for use.

EPA gave BP until today to pick an alternative, and then another 72 hours after that to begin using the alternative in the Gulf. A couple weeks ago we covered the concern that Corexit—the dispersant BP has been using all along—could have toxic side effects, and that a less toxic (and possibly more effective) alternative could be available. With the EPA order, BP is finally moving in that direction.

U.S. Polychemical of Spring Valley, N.Y., which makes a dispersant called Dispersit SPC 1000, said Thursday morning that it had received an order from BP and would increase its production to 20,000 gallons a day in the next few days, and eventually to as much as 60,000 gallons a day [The New York Times].

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