Like anyone with a heart, I’ve been saddened and outraged by the images of oil-covered birds and turtles from the Gulf. As a diver, I was concerned from the start about the potential effects of the oil and dispersant on the life we land-dwellers can’t see — the life teaming deep beneath the surface.

Recently, I put together a reading list for World Oceans Day. Of the dozen books listed, two were by Dr. Sylvia Earle, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and former chief scientist with the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration.

Gale Mead

Gale Mead

Two out of a dozen apparently wasn’t good enough for Earle’s daughter, Gale Mead, who suggested adding her mother’s most recent book, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One. On a whim, I did a search for Mead. I was delighted by what I found. Not only is Mead an explorer in her own right, she’s also a talented musician with a wonderful CD titled Common Good that’s filled with as much passion and life as a coral reef. And, it turned out, Mead had filmed the first — and only — glimpse of the bountiful life on a seamount off the Louisiana coast. Unfortunately, that spot is just sixteen miles from where, eight years later, the BP Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 and spewing millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The OnEarth Video

I contacted Mead and she readily agreed to do an over-the-phone interview/narration of her 2002 dive, including her assessment of the threat posed to this unique ecosystem by oil and chemical dispersants. The resulting video was produced for OnEarth magazine, a part of that publication’s continuing coverage of the Gulf disaster.

Oil flowing by Cape Cod this summer from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster could be a barely perceptible thin and intermittent film — or a toxic mass capable of killing wildlife in and out of the water. The concentration of oil along the eastern seaboard depends on how much oil is actually coming from the well in the first place, researchers at at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) tell the Phoenix Sun.

Earlier this month NCAR released a series of computer model animations suggesting that oil from the BP disaster may be on its way out of the Gulf of Mexico, up the eastern seaboard and, by sometime this summer, far out into the North Atlantic.

At the time, NCAR emphasized that the series, which tracks oil concentration, is not a forecast, but a “likely” pathway based on average weather and currents.

“I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘Will the oil reach Florida?’” says NCAR scientist Synte Peacock. “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.”

But the model used what turns out to be a conservative baseline in estimating the oil flow — only about half the daily flow rate federal officials now consider the upper estimate of oil spewing into the Gulf.

“The actual amount of oil that gets anywhere,” said Peacock in an email, “will depend critically on knowing the concentration of oil at the spill site.”

Official oil flow rate keeps rising

The official daily flow rate has increased from its initial level of 1,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd), to 5,000 bpd, to 19,000 bpd and, most recently, to 40,000 bpd. That number is certain to change, too. It is is based on data obtained before the riser was cut — an operation that many experts believe increased the flow by approximately 20 percent.

All six computer animations are on the NCAR website.

No one wants to push species into extinction, decimate ecosystems, pollute the ocean, trash nature or destroy the planet. Still, it’s good to remind ourselves from time to time exactly how precious this planet is and why it’s important to prevent inadvertent catastrophes.

We don’t need to create villains. All we have to do is celebrate life.

Assertively.

Enjoy this new public service announcement by *The Nature Conservancy.

The Nature Conservancy, Music by Jason Mraz

*Full disclosure: my daughter works for TNC. While she has a lovely voice, and used to play a mean French Horn, she didn’t work on this video.

Photo credit: The Nature Conservancy