Environment has a vast impact on this nation

Giant plumes of crude oil mixed with methane are sweeping the ocean depths with devastating consequences. ‘I’m not too worried about oil on the surface,’ says one scientist. ‘It’s the things we don’t see that worry me the most. An enormous release of crude oil not only onto vulnerable shorelines and fragile marshes but into the largely unexplored depths of the sea. The consequences for the delicate balance of existence in the vulnerable ecosystems of the gulf, and for the vast cycles of nature that sustain life there and beyond, are as incalculable as they are potentially devastating.

“I’m not too worried about oil on the surface,” says chemist Ed Overton of Louisiana State University. “It’s going to cause very substantial and noticeable damage—marsh loss and coastal erosion and impact on fisheries, dead birds, dead turtles—but we’ll know what that is. It’s the things we don’t see that worry me the most. What happens if you wipe out all those jellyfish down there? We don’t know what their role is in the environment. But Mother Nature put them there for a reason,” and many are in the plumes’ paths.



LINK: http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/4500-animals-killed-in-bp-spill-and-counting.html

SOURCE: Begley, Sharon. "What the Spill Will Kill." The Daily Beast. Newsweek/Daily Beast, 05 June 2010. Web. 10 May 2012. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/06/06/what-the-spill-will-kill.html.