Found the following online but as a layperson can't quite understand what he is saying - is he trying to say that the leaks coming from the sea bed
are not what they seem and so not to panic ?
here's the article and here is
the first part of it...
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Currently surrounding the situation in the Gulf are several stories circulating online, about oil venting from cracks in the ocean floor in the
area where the broken BOP stack is located, with pressures appearing to fluctuate wildly.There are reasons why this is happening.
Horizon's borehole is actually located in between allochthonous salt bodies and autochthonous salt layers in sub-floor Macondo region. The
near-surface sediment is young and unconsolidated muck. Shallow water-flow is a big issue here (that is overpressured unconsolidated sands, sometimes
with biogenic gas
( that's produced by sub-floor microbial life ) or just overpressured brine — a very unstable near-surface section. The " Gumbo Zone " the
borehole passes through, is the region in which sub-floor microbes proliferate. Strike-slip movements, which are common in this area, exert pressures
on sub-floor hydrocarbon pathways . In conjunction with microbial biogenic hydrocarbon gas productions, this is responsible for fluctuating flow
pressures. Were there no heat sources in the sub-floor, the gases would stay where they are due to pressures. However, since heat and pressure are the
influencing factors that dictate gas sublimation, this is understandably intertwined with microbial processes. Methane hydrates form and stay at the
deep ocean floor levels due to the fact that any heat produced by pyroclastic oil venting, is immediately lost to the surrounding seawater acting as a
heat-sink. Deep ocean pressures keep these gases low, where in turn, other microbial strains digest them and produce other products, like a unique
form of sulfur, in the form of " mats ". The problem of fluctuations in pressure could have been caused by the force-injection of lower temperature
drilling mud, introduced by the " Top Kill " method. Why ?
If bacteria that normally live in high temperature sub-floor zones have their proliferation rates kept in check by temperatures, than lowering the
temperature by sub-floor mud-flooding could easily create a temporary environment conducive to the faster division rate of lower temp-loving microbes,
which can in turn push the whole reservoir food-chain off-balance. In the mid-1990s, scientists found novel hyperthermophilic microbes in hot oil
reservoirs 3 kilometers below the North Sea and the North Slope of Alaska. Oil producers had thought that microorganisms, which “sour” or
contaminate oil, were introduced into wells, but, in fact, they are naturally occurring and live on organic compounds in oil.scientists generally
agree that life could exist at temperatures as high as 140° to 145°C (284° to 295°F). Typically sub-floor temperature increases with sediment
depth by about 40°C to 50°C per kilometer (about 115°F to 145°F per mile ).Horizon was drilled to a depth of 35,050'.That's 6.6382575 miles. The
temperature at the ocean floor is approximately 39 degrees F. So drilling mud, passing through 5k'+ feet of of pipe in cold water, will by any
logical conclusion, be at the ambient water temp by the time it passes the horizon of the Mesopelagic region/sub-floor divide.
So what effects could their operations be having ? Nobody knows for sue, but one thing I know for sure and that's that BP won't release current
pertinent sub-floor geo-data to the public.
Below are some graphics depicting the food chain cycle of oliphilic microbial life in the deep-ocean subfloor.
(see article for graphs)