Nothing surprises me anymore (I hope).
Spilled oil consists of volatile and heavy elements. The volatile elements tend to evaporate, the heavy fractions eventually sink to the sea floor. (They can of course cause further damage there, as benthic damage resulting from the Deepwater Horizons spill attests.) Surface oil may also burn (as seems to be occurring here.) Some 20--40% of the mass of a slick may evaporate into the atmosphere. Some of the oil is water-soluble and will mix with the water column at depth, while 10--30% falls to or mixes with sediments on the seafloor.
Oil can also be washed onto shorlines --- beaches and rocks. Here it will mix with or coat sand and rocks. This is highly visible, but usually only a small fraction of the total spill volume. Wildlife, particularly birds, tend to be strongly and visibly affected.
At the surface, oil forms a slick. Wind and wave action tend to spread and disperse this, mixing the oil with the water column. Lighter fractions will eventually rise.
Managed responses to oil spills include skimming (booms and absorbants), burning (of concentrated oil), and dispersion (of widely-distributed oil). Skimming and burning where possible do remove the oil from the water column relatively quickly. The record on dispersants, which tend to be chemical-based agents themselves affecting sea life in the area, is more mixed. None of these methods are applicable to tropical-storm (or worse) conditions. Note that the spill in question here is far out of any possible track of Hurricane Elsa.
https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about/media/how-do-oil...
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a5786/oil-sp...
question: is it better for the oil to burn up? i'm sure not all of it makes it to the surface, but maybe better than dispersing in the water where we'd never get it out?
From the videos I've seen, I'd suspect a fair amount of natural gas in the leak, which is typical of at least some oil fields in the area. More so near Trinidad and Tobago, which is not exactly close to the field in question.
I've also read back with the last giant spill that the chemicals they use to 'clean up' really just break the oil down into smaller droplets so it falls to the floor. if that's true it almost sounds worse like micro plastics.
On on the one hand, it might spread out the petroleum and prevent an oil slick from forming, making it less ecologically damaging. On the other hand, it might be combusting a negligible amount of the fuel and spreading the rest as tiny particles that aren't small enough to overcome a turbulent sea and collect at the surface, so they enter the respiratory and digestive systems of everything in the gulf.
Yakutia gets impressively cold in winter, but it is no slouch in summer, either. It normally gets up to 38℃ (100℉). Those horses take both the summer heat and the winter cold outdoors, unsheltered. That's a 108℃ (194℉) range they handle.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/equus-story-of-the-horse-abo...
Don't get me wrong. Climate change is real. But these blunt claims like "it was raining today and the same day last year there was no rain so we are all doomed" hurt more than help dealing with the issue.
We need more statistics. We need to make less conclusion from single incidents.
Re: climate change, I don't quite get the call for "less conclusions from single incidents". It's not like research is non-existent or contradictory, is it? Just a quick google search leads me to articles like this[0] saying there's well over 300 studies supporting the idea that extreme weather events can be blamed on humans.
I feel like saying "correlation is not causation" when the world is quite literally on fire is about as close as it gets to the "this is fine" meme...
[0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affect...
OK, then present statistics (not you, but everyone who try to convince climate change from single incidents).
Individual incidents only damage the cause. Fires happened all the time in the last million years. One can't come to correct conclusions about they getting more frequent from their personal observation of news feed.
> Just a quick google search leads me to articles like this
As I said, I'm not denying climate change, global warming, increased frequency of forest fires etc.
Just don't be (not you) religious pro-climate-change fanatic indistinguishable from client-change-denier fanatic. Present data, studies.
No offense, but this sounds awfully like the "temperature rises occurred before" rhetoric, while ignoring magnitude[0]
Yes forest fires can be natural, but for this specific one, another comment upthread mentioned it potentially being linked to a history of illegal logging. The melting of the polar cap has been documented fairly thoroughly, and I already mentioned the existence of studies about extreme weather. We know for fact that there's a strong relationship between our polluting ways and arctic ice melting, and that there's a relationship between that and extreme weather events. Hopefully it shouldn't take a PhD to figure out irresponsible human-made logging fires + record high temperatures are a recipe for disaster(tm)
Personally, I think we're a little past the "show us the data" territory. "Seriously, WTF?" might be more in order at this point.
Yes, dozens of them, year after year! Nothing to see here. Def not climate change tho, just a coincidence.
Unfortunately, the dipshit comment (now flagged) a couple of replies above yours catapulted the other dipshit comment into upvote territory because despite its total lack of substance, people had to upvote it as some kind of political statement. Yeah, how dare this be downvoted, it's a very important comment (stating nothing of importance) about how disaster is happening everywhere all the time with zero nuance or introspection about why this might be! Le upvote!
I'd also like to know what my comment was flagged for, but I guess that's out of the question too. It's not very fun being censored with no explanation whatsoever.
Why did you jump to so many conclusions and resort so quickly to namecalling?