Underwater Oil Volcano

Worse than expected. Much, much worse:

The problem with the April 20 spill is that it isn't really a spill: It‘s a gush, like an underwater oil volcano. A hot column of oil and gas is spurting into freezing, black waters nearly a mile down, where the pressure nears a ton per inch, impossible for divers to endure. Experts call it a continuous, round-the-clock calamity, unlike a leaking tanker, which might empty in hours or days.

"Everything about it is unprecedented," said geochemist Christopher Reddy, an oil-spill expert and head of the Coastal Ocean Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "All our knowledge is based on a one-shot event…. With this, we don't know when it's going to stop."

Accidents have occurred before in which oil has gushed from damaged wells, he said. But he knew of none in water so deep.

...

To BP falls the daunting task of trying to stop the gush before it becomes the most damaging spill in American history. If the flow is not stopped, it will exhaust the natural reservoir of oil beneath the sea floor, experts say. Many months, at least, could pass.

Imagine months, even a year of oil bleeding into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning the Gulf, the land around it, leaking into the Atlantic and poisoning the East Coast, creeping up while commercial fishing disappears and all the animals up the food chain start dying as well.

We've ripped a hole in Mother Earth and now she's bleeding out.

Drill, baby, drill?

Assholes.