if a piece of dispersed oil meets and touches another piece of dispersed

oil do they join and become a bigger piece of dispersed oil or do they bounce away?

and follow the tide.

is forever

I don't know.

as do household cleaners containing the similar chemicals.

Perfectly even distibution thoughout the Gulf , using the recent figure of the amount of disperant used to date, would result in one part dispersant per 20 million of water. I'm not saying that perfect distribution would occur - just the result if it did so. If anyone don't agree that figure then work out the volume of the disperant and divide by the amount of water in the Gulf.

you need to work out the volume of the dispersant and divide that by the amount of water in all the oceans.

Ultimately, there will be perfectly even distribution around the world, since the oceans are all interconnected. If I remember correctly (and that is a big if) there is something like 5 quadrillion gallons of water in the oceans...

from the claimed figure of 2 million gallons , the blogs not BP's , that the volume of that is c.12,000 cubic yards. If you multiple that by the reciprocal of the volume in the Gulf , 2434000000000, you'd reach the figure I mentioned of c. 1:20 million. Same approach to figure ratio to world's oceans albeit that the world's oceans don't necessarily include the Gulf which to me is sea.

2x 10^6 gallons : 5 x 10^15 gallons = 1 : 2.5 x 10^8 (or 1:2,500,000,000) ( +20 million in case all the world's oceans don't include the gulf, which I suspect they do, since it was a measure of circulating water, not its actual containers.)

computer fucked up - not DU.

Because that's a "purified" product.

Crude is full of stuff that breaks down. It's natural after all.

The figures I've read on the natural decomposition cycle of crude exposed to air is about 5 years. The dispersant may actually impede that because it prevents oil from floating in the sun and air.

re. slowing down decomposition.

Oil leaks naturally into ocean. Now not as much as the DWH spill but it does leak and has been for hundreds of thousands of years.

If oil is forever the global oceans would be saturated with oil from a millennium of slow leaks.

is it not 'oil' any longer?

is to cause separation and that's it. Yes of course its still oil - just in droplets instead of a slick. Unfortunately its a matter of the lesser of two evils - droplets or a slick. Given forced choice on the subject some would prefer one against the other. I'm reasonably certain that those on the actual coastline itself would prefer droplets to a slick - that's how it would be in the UK. And please - don't someone interject with the fairy story that Corexit is banned in the UK where the restriction is on rocky shore use only.

nt

that it prevents limpets etc attachings themselves to rocks. An inability to do so makes them prone to be eaten by predators. For that specific reason it was classified as being harmful to sealife on rocky shores - a sort of understandable oddity. The disperant itself was not found to be harmful, here, to sealife when used in offshore applications.

In stating the above I'm not passing judgement - just stating fact. Broadly speaking, here in the UK , when dispersants have been used in the past the droplets sink to the sea floor and their size gradually reduces with fricion on the sand as they roll about. Yes - those that get washed ashore are a nuicance because the tar balls melt in the sun. I also appreciate that the English Channel is not the depth of the Gulf so circumstances obviously differ.

Wiki the Torrey Canyon and read how the RAF napalmed slicks years ago. The mind boggles.

:hi:

ultimately as other posted said, it will degrade.

Actually, eventually it will meet up with oil-metabolizing bacteria and be completely broken down. In fact, some of that is going on right now, which is unfortunately concentrated enough to enlarge the already existing oxygen-free dead zone in the gulf.

is the reason I originally asked the question.


so there is so much water in the Gulf that these bits of oil will seldom meet?


how do the fish's bodies deal with meeting now and again bits of oil - same for all sea life?

and our kids playing in the water that may have a bit of dispersed oil?

guess I'm just being a worry wort - what's done is done.

that they don't really join and combine - just appear to do so. If left to stand I think you'd find that the cooking oil rises to the top.

You wouldn't add soap if you were cooking but if you did then yes they would part combine. To understand why check out soap : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap

I think the only way in general that it may affect fish is if it has displaced the oxygen in the water.

Years ago when I was a child I used to amuse myself with the little grease puddles floating around on the top of my bowl of beef stew.

I noticed that one big puddle could be broken up with my spoon into lots of little puddles, but they would not join together again unless I used my spoon to break the "walls" of two adjoining puddles so they could merge.


Not sure what this has to do with oil in the Gulf except that maybe my mom's beef stew sort of tasted like dirty dishwater and axle grease...

They'll even make a movie about it: Attack of the Killer Tarballs.