Gulf Oil to Reach the East Coast

According to new data derived from computer simulations of the current Gulf of Mexico situation, it would appear that oil from the slicks is bound to pass by Florida, and then go up the East Coast of the United States in coming months. Unfortunately, there is little authorities can do to prevent this even if they somehow manage to stop the oil leaks today. That, however, seems unlikely to happen anytime soon, given the depth of the erupting wellheads, and the number of failed attempts at shutting them down. The oil will apparently be carried northwards by the Loop Current, Wired reports.

This is a fast, deep-water current that passes through the Gulf of Mexico and then heads eastwards, towards the coasts of Florida. There, it meets up with the Gulf Stream, one of the largest and most important currents in the world, and a major component of the North Atlantic Conveyor Belt. This means that, in addition to contaminating cities such as New York, the oil could also reach regions such as Greenland and Iceland, as well as the United Kingdom, France and Spain. Though it seems unlikely for the oil to reach this far out, chances are fairly high that it will go up the East Coast.

“I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘Will the oil reach Florida?’ Actually, our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida, with impacts that have yet to be understood,” explains National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Synte Peacock. The expert wrote in a press release on June 3 that the model predicts more far-reaching devastation than imagined at the beginning of the current crisis, more than six weeks ago. However, he adds that predicting the exact course of the oil sheens is virtually impossible and that the computer simulations can only give researchers a view of how things might develop, not how they actually will.

“We have been asked if and when remnants of the spill could reach the European coastlines. Our assumption is that the enormous lateral mixing in the ocean together with the biological disintegration of the oil should reduce the pollution to levels below harmful concentrations. But we would like to have this backed up by numbers from some of the best ocean models,” added in a press release German expert Martin Visbeck, who is based at the Kiel University Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences. He is also a member of the team that conducted the simulations. The models were developed and simulated at the New Mexico Computer Applications Center, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where some of the most powerful supercomputers in the US are based.