Oil is disappearing from the Gulf of Mexico faster than expected.
"That oil is somewhere. It didn't just disappear," said Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser.Salvador Cepriano is one of the men searching for crude. Cepriano, a shrimper, has been laying out boom with his boat, but he's found that there's no oil to catch. ...
Even the federal government admits that locating the oil has become a problem.
"It is becoming a very elusive bunch of oil for us to find," said National Incident Cmdr. Thad Allen.
The numbers don't lie: two weeks ago, skimmers picked up about 25,000 barrels of oily water. Last Thursday, they gathered just 200 barrels.
Still, it doesn't mean that all the oil that gushed for weeks is gone. Thousands of small oil patches remain below the surface, but experts say an astonishing amount has disappeared, reabsorbed into the environment. ...
The light crude began to deteriorate the moment it escaped at high pressure, and then it was zapped with dispersants to speed the process along. The oil that did make it to the ocean's surface was broken up by 88-degree water, baked by 100-degree sun, eaten by microbes, and whipped apart by wind and waves.
Wait a second... am I supposed to believe that a supposed environmental catastrophe has turned out to not be as bad as everyone predicted? Impossible!
