Although there has been progress in slowing it (as you can see in the video above), the oil spill coming from BP’s oil well in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be much worse than realized, which isn’t all that surprising. After all,  they are dealing with the spill occurring as a massive rate about a mile below the surface of the water. At that depth, they are dealing with very low temperatures and very high pressures, one of the reasons the first attempt to cap the well by BP was unsuccessful. So now we have video evidence from the site of the actual leak showing that the leak may be 5-14 times faster than believed to be based on surface appearances.

But why don’t the two correlate? After all, the oil has to be somewhere. Well, scientists have also discovered very large oil plumes. Think of them as “oil clouds” under the ocean’s surface, in some cases miles in size and at various depths. These plumes help explain the discrepancy between the video flow evidence and the satellite images of the spill.  But, how is that possible when we learned in elementary school science that oil is less dense than water and will float in water?

Well,  BP added in another variable – the use of chemical dispersants injected directly into the oil flow. The goal was to break up the oil into much smaller particles that would spread out much further, thereby decreasing the overall concentrated effect of the oil spill, a worthy goal. However, if the oil was broken up into small enough droplets, they may not have the ability to rise as rapidly, creating the oil plumes which are starting to choke of the oxygen supply to the affected areas and may result is mass kills of ocean wildlife. Read more about it here.