The Deepwater Horizon Spill and Doomsday

Will the BP Gulf disaster kill us all? According to a Helium article, yes. “251 million years ago a mammoth undersea methane bubble caused massive explosions, poisoned the atmosphere and destroyed more than 96  percent of all life on Earth. Now, worried scientists are increasingly concerned the same series of catastrophic events that led to worldwide death back then may be happening again.” The article, authored by one Terrance Aym, goes on to cite theories that, thanks to BP, conditions are ripe for another mass extinction. Within the next six months.

But wait. Don’t panic just yet, because i09 did an excellent job of debunking Aym's report. Dave Valentine of UC Santa Barbara and Chris Reddy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, who study methane and oil seeps from the sea floor, say there are methane bubbles (and methane ice) beneath the ocean floor, but "there is no plausible scenario by which this event alone will cause global-scale extinctions.”

And I'm glad to hear it. But even though we aren’t all going to die in the next six months, the  “astonishingly high” methane levels in the Gulf mean that marine mammals, sea birds, amphibians and fish are not going to escape this catastrophe unscathed.

“As much as 1 million times the normal level of methane gas has been found in some regions near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, enough to potentially deplete oxygen and create a dead zone, U.S. scientists said on Tuesday,” the Huffington Post reported. “Dead zones are large regions of water that are very low in oxygen, a condition known as 'hypoxia' and therefore they can't support life.”

And what that means, in layman's terms, is that these harrowing images may only evidence the beginning of the devastation. Of course, wildlife is also threatened by the oil itself — ingesting it (directly and through the food chain), getting covered in it, and having spawning and nesting areas contaminated by it.

Though it appears the Coast Guard has backed off its earlier restrictions preventing media access to oil clean-up sites, and will now allow credentialed members of the press within the boom safety zones, the new allowances still do not address the issue of volunteers. Moreover, as of yesterday, the 85th day of the spill, it was estimated that between 94 and 184 million gallons of crude have been spewed into the ocean. Though B.P. has finally capped off the gushing well, the devastating consequences of this disaster will continue to unfold for months, and probably years, to come.

So life on Earth may not be extinct in the next six months. But we can’t relax just yet.

Photo credit: eutrophication&hypoxia