Stop drilling before is too late - the true scientific scare

No one knows the long range consequences of the Gulf oil spill. But everyone knows that it is going to cause the worse catastrophe ever resulting from human intervention in our natural environment.

It is well known that oil will contaminate the Gulf of Mexico and probably some areas of the Atlantic Ocean (as it is carried out by the Gulf stream) for many years to come. Contamination will suffocate corals and marine life in such high proportions that it will have no precedence in written history. Many animal and vegetable species will disappear.

The fishery and tourist industries are already suffering a severe hit in the Gulf and possibly as far as the US Atlantic Coast.

All of this is known but conveniently kept quite. The powers that be are afraid of panic and probably even more of the political backlash.

But there are many other consequences that are not well known or have an speculative nature because they have not been studied as they should have before licensing perforations on the deep oceans.

One of them is that scientist discovered a species of worms living at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico that feed on the oil slowly seeping from natural fissures at the seabed. The 'wildcat' tubeworm actually sucks oil naturally seeping from those fissures. That was a way for the natural ecosystem control of oil spillage. The problem now is that the millions of barrels from the BP oil spillage will literally suffocate and kill these worms. Therefore, even when the man-made spill is controlled, the natural spillage from fissures will no longer have a natural ecosystem control. This new problem might be unsolvable.

Such a problem is peanuts compared with the conclusions from the research just published by scientists at Northwestern and Texas A&M. They are warning a complacent World that the BP oil spill may cause the World to end. This is no joke! Not only they find that the oil spill is enhancing hypoxia, or oxygen depletion, in a dead zone which can grow to the size of thousands of square miles because oil-hungry microbes are expected to consume more oxygen from the water as they feast on hydrocarbons. If those facts were not enough, much worse is their find about the massive methane gas deposits underneath the seabed that have caused in a distant past two great life extinctions in our Planet.

Undersea gashes in the sea floor will cause an undersea bubble that might explode or at least contaminate and make unbreathable the air in large areas of the Earth. In fact, these large undersea gashes, plus an increase in pressure causing an elevated seabed and a steady stream of the methane gas erupting into the ocean have been reported in the area around the Deepwater Horizon spill, causing the scientist to believe that a 20-mile-wide bubble of methane may soon emerge from the ocean floor and suffocate many people living in this part of the World. Thousands of perforations are debilitating the natural enclosure of the gas.

Other scientist consider these forecasts too speculative and alarmists. However, we'll better be aware of the danger. At the very least, we should stop drilling in these deep water areas where it is proven that we have no control when accidents happen. If they are ever resumed, corporations should pay in advance the foreseeable cost of containment and remedy when any of the expected "accidents" eventually occur.

The United States counts today three full months since the fateful day of the BP oil well explosion – three months of toxic oil gushing by the millions of gallons into the sea; three months of poisoning wildlife, ecosystems, and beaches; three months of Gulf-dependent communities grinding to a halt.

Today some naive or quite indifferent people will also celebrate – celebrate a temporary cap on top of the well that appears to be halting -or at least reducing- the flow of oil. But the cap is temporary, and workers continue to struggle for a permanent end to the 92-day flow of oil – which, given the amount of oil already spilled, is just the first step to ending this national nightmare.

Despite our best intentions, we are tempted to look away. We want to forget the heartache and return to our “normal” lives. But there is immense damage and pain left behind, and we must not lose heart now.

US elected officials leave for their summer vacation at the end of the month, but for those directly impacted by the oil spill there won’t be a summer vacation for a long time. We can’t let this tragedy leave us unchanged. It is time to end our addiction to oil – as individuals, but also as a nation.

If you are an American citizen or resident, will you help in keeping the pressure on Congress to pass clean energy legislation and aid to the Gulf?

Most people do not know that so much oil and gas is being pumped from the earth crust that it is causing caverns, sinkholes and other unstable situations that may promote earthquakes.

Surface land is actually sinking (or subsidizing) in many areas of high oil and gas exploitation, leading to a variety of problems, including the activation of dormant faults.

Not only gas and oil exploitation is responsible for these problems but the huge amount of water being removed from underground aquifers. South-central Arizona suffers the results of goundwater pumping. In addition to creating crevices, it has resulted in deep fissures, some hundreds of feet long.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been working with very little publicity on the problem of subsidence for decades.

However, corporations exploiting these resources are allowed to ignore the future costs to society of their operations. These costs are eventually paid by governments (i.e. taxpayers).

These problems and facts are maintained under the table favoring big industries with low costs in their operations and thus transfering those costs to future generations or to the victims of "natural" disasters actually caused by this negligence.

His Holiness Benedict XVI was very clear in this respect in his most recent Encyclical (the underlining is mine):

"Let us hope that the international community and individual governments will succeed in countering harmful ways of treating the environment. It is likewise incumbent upon the competent authorities to make every effort to ensure that the economic and social costs of using up shared environmental resources are recognized with transparency and fully borne by those who incur them, not by other peoples or future generations: the protection of the environment, of resources and of the climate obliges all international leaders to act jointly and to show a readiness to work in good faith ..." (Address to the UN General Assembly, 18 April 2008, and later included in the text of Caritas in Veritate, 50)