CBS has some new findings on the Well from Hell: Researcher: Extent of BP oil spill’s damage to sea-floor life “astounding”

NEW ORLEANS The vast 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill damaged the tiny animals that live on the sea floor for about 57 square miles around the blown-out BP oil well, with severe damage in about nine square miles of that area, says a researcher from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.

Pollution and damage to animal life was severe nearly two miles from the wellhead and identifiable more than 10 miles away, Paul Montagna wrote in a report published Tuesday in the online journal PLOS One.

Montagna, a professor of ecosystems and modeling, said the refrigerator-cold water a mile beneath the surface means oil takes longer to decay than in shallower waters, where spill recovery has taken years to decades. That means full recovery could take a generation or more, he said in an interview Tuesday.

The ‘tiny animals’ are at the bottom of the food chain. When they die off, everything above them dies off. There is a massive amount of crude oil on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and it wasn’t deposited in a circular pattern around the well site, there were plumes of oil tracked well away from the site.

Not all oil floats to the surface, some of it sinks to the bottom. It is very cold in the deep Gulf which significantly reduces the microbes that can actually eat and convert oil. In the warm and shallow Bay of Campeche the massive oil spill was converted relatively rapidly, but that process is much slower in deep water.

BP responded with typical obfuscation and sputtering.

The US Geological Survey reported it as a 7.7 quake located 66km North-Northeast of Awaran, in the Baluchistan province of Pakistan at a depth of 20km occurring at 6:29AM CDT yesterday. There have been more than a dozen aftershocks ranging from 5.9 to 4.0 in the area. The ABC has more information and a decent map in their report: Pakistan earthquake death toll rises to 80, as tremor creates a new island in the sea.

The death toll will certainly rise as they reach the isolated communities around the epicenter. Most of the homes are constructed with mud bricks and have probably collapsed in a quake that strong.

Update: the BBC reports that the has climbed to over 300, and predictions that it will be much higher.