If you've been watching the live video from the gusher, you'll have noticed the brand new yellow ring they inserted into the plume, apparently to more evenly inject the Corexit dispersant into the oil.
Oh good.
Environmental engineer Joe Taylor on the dispersant:
He says the sulfur and sulfuric acid based dispersant makes the oil spewing into the gulf sink, where its impossible to clean up--and where it depletes oxygen levels under the water, killing plankton and everything above plankton in the food chain. "Corexit is toxic, petroleum is toxic, and its depleting the oxygen levels," he says.
What's worse says Taylor, is that if he knows this information, so does BP. "They have a lot of chemists who are a lot smarter than I am, and they know this," he says.
Of course there's no way of knowing the long term impact on humans, but it's not difficult to envision a decade or two from now a new epidemic of birth defects like autism or new strains of unexplained cancers. And everyone will be wondering, "How did this happen?"
I tend to subscribe to the hypothesis that most diseases and birth defects are multi-causal. It's possible that it's not just cellphones that cause brain tumors, but cellphones combined with the aspartame in diet foods and beverages. With the magnitude of the oil spill, we have 80,000,000 gallons of toxic oil combined with a million gallons of toxic dispersant combined with potential ocean dead zones combined with a variety of other toxins in the food supply or in prescription medications or in the air and water -- and POW! All new varieties of awfulness with multiple and therefore mysterious causes.