Nine Questions (and Provisional Answers) About The Spill

Piercing the fog of the BP disaster, Peter Coy and Paul M. Barrett lay out the best current thinking

The sea is slow to reveal its secrets, and so is BP. The regulators and other companies caught up in the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster are almost as opaque. Whether motivated by the need for self-protection, the desire to get it right before releasing information, or the inevitable fog of a shape-shifting crisis, the sometimes conflicting statements released by BP, the Minerals Management Service, and others have left a raft of unanswered questions. How much oil is spewing into the Gulf each day? How much damage is it doing, and will the ecosystem ever recover? Who made the decisions that led to this nightmare?

The woman in charge of measuring the spill, Marcia McNutt of the U.S. Geological Survey, invoked the Rumsfeldian phrase "unknown unknowns" on May 27 while explaining why her Flow Rate Technical Group was having trouble figuring out how much oil was billowing from BP's broken well (more than 12,000 barrels a day, with no reliable upper limit). The same uncertainty surrounds enviromental impacts. "I don't think anyone knows, no matter what they say," says Nicholas Fisher, a professor of marine science at Stony Brook University in New York. "People want clean, simple answers to clean, simple questions, but we don't have them."

What follows is a careful attempt to take stock: asking the important questions and laying out the best current thinking on them. At the very least, we should all know what we don't know.

Will part of the Gulf be a Dead Zone?

Big oil spills of the past are poor guides to the Deepwater Horizon disaster because all of them occurred in shallower water. This time, with the leak at 5,000 feet, a great deal of the oil hasn't reached the surface. Scientists say that under the immense pressure at that depth, much of it has turned into a diluted mist of hair-width droplets that are staying submerged in vast clouds. As recently as June 6, BP chief executive officer Tony Hayward said there was no evidence of such plumes in the Gulf. On June 8, however, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration announced that they had indeed been found thousands of feet down.

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