Urgent Questions on the survey-research cruise by NOAA Okeanos Explorer

• by BK Lim (7 Sept 2011, revised 13 Sept 2011)

This is one of the several inquiries from concerned residents in the gulf:

I recently made a post to your wall regarding the NOAA vessel Okeanos Explorer which in past weeks has spent a great deal of time running grids in the Macondo Well area. If you click on the link in the message it will take take you to the NOAA Fleet Map. In the left hand column you can click on the Okeanos Explorer button and it will highlight that vessel's location, which at present shows it still in the Macondo area.

If you click on the Okeanos symbol, which is EX, a window pops up. Within that window is a link showing the vessel's latest track. You can zoom in on that track with the tool provided in the left hand corner of the screen. After reading through the list of this vessel's capabilities, my guess would be that they are mapping the sea floor extensively in this region. They also ran down the ridge along the entire Florida coast south to the Keys.

I was wondering if you might have any thoughts on what information they might be able to gather or what they are looking for.

http://shiptracker.noaa.gov/gShiptracker/map.aspx

NOAA Fleet Map ; shiptracker.noaa.gov

1. Thank you Peter for alerting me on this. Had been busy with some "discoveries" on the tsunami-triggering devices. Another stealth weapon of mass-destruction with enormous economic spinoff for the perpetrators. There is always a broad spectrum of stocks you can invest in and short sell to reap enormous windfalls on an accidental "disaster" that could be reliably predicted well before hand.
2. Since the beginning of the disaster, experts had known the wide and long term consequences of the Macondo Blowout. The perpetrators knew as well but it was to their interest to narrowly focus on just Well A; so as to avoid highly embarrassing questions for which the answers were blatantly obvious.
3. They were at the same time also interested in knowing the scope of their destruction; in preparation for their next disaster in the pipeline.
4. But they could not openly survey in the immediate aftermath of the blowout. It would be an open admission that the late Matts Simmons and many gulf-truth advocates were dead right. Well A was just the dud. The blown crater at the 3^rd well was spewing more than 100,000 barrels per day. Even worse the highly corrosive mix of brine, and gas ingress into every crevices and permeable sections of the formation, creating new pathways to the seafloor for the heavier hydrocarbons from the Macondo reservoir.
5. A seafloor survey then would have revealed the ugly truths about the broken seafloor and precarious salt formation they were trying so hard to hide.
6. So why now?
7. Well, thanks to hard working and persistent gulf-truth activists (Trisha Sprinstead, Trisha James, Real Coastal warriors, Maureen, Michele & others) and the unfortunate recurrence of dead wildlife, tainted seafood, oil slicks etc, the fundamental issues of the BP Gulf Oil disaster were kept alive. Contrary to what the court and regulators said, the number of sick gulf victims increases and the gulf water is not getting any better. BP has no choice but to come up with a better PR exercise, one that is more convincing in stamping out the persistent doubts of BP's “good intentions to make the Gulf as good as before” if not in deeds but at least in a documented “scientific research” remotely controlled and funded by BP.
8. Is this supposed to be the “ultimate survey-research” that will put an end to more than 15 months of “speculations”? No wonder WHOI would have no part of it. If I refused as WHOI had, I could then be dismissed as being “not credible” and unwilling to submit to ground-proofing.
9. After more than a year of grouting, patching up and destroying all critical evidence in the seabed around the Macondo wells they are confident enough, the "modified seafloor" would not be criminally incriminating. It is akin to letting a murderer a month to clean up the crime scene before sending in the CSI team. Previous ROV videos showed planted marker ropes and buoys at the known gas vents and oil seeps locations at between 50 to 700m from well A. See one video of the gas / oil vent at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgDxR0nYTFo
10. Having marked and monitored these gas / oil vents, it would be easy for BP's funded seafloor survey to avoid those locations with a single sweep lines a few tens of metres apart. The irregularly spaced lines would have too much uncovered zones in between to be of significant value.
11. The fact that the seafloor survey (using the various multibeam sonar and sub-bottom profiling techniques) has been delayed by more than 15 months is by itself an open admission BP had a lot of skeletons to hide in this disaster. Such seafloor survey should have been conducted as soon as possible as to determine the causes of the disaster. So my strong hunch is that this belated seafloor survey is nothing more than a carefully choreographed survey designed to show the world that the Macondo Disaster had ended and the new oil spills are nothing more than natural random spills.
12. So now you see why I was asked to submit my recommended locations for ground proofing?
13. It was a well-calculated risk game that BP could not loose...akin to “Head BP wins, Tail BK lose”. I had played this game many times in the past. Rov camera view is like a “pin-hole” view of the universe. A gas vent or oil seep just a few metres off the ROV track and you see nothing. Without an expert's interpretation, many of you would not make anything significant out of the video shown in (9). In fact if I had not followed a rov live tour of the seabed on 1 Nov 2010, I could not have been so dead certain of the seabed conditions.
14. see http://bklim.newsvine.com/_news/2010/10/31/5386300-a-new-drilling-rig-at-macondo-site?commentId=18975303#c18975303 ….quote “ LT, I had a 2 hours live tour of the seafloor around the site last night. It is a lot worse than we thought. Will be writing on it shortly.” …..#4.3 - Mon Nov 1, 2010 6:15 PM PDT
15. Should I obediently followed BP's orders into the “trap”? Heck no, especially when so many of my predicted scenarios are being proven right.
16. Should I be surprised I was asked to recommend some locations to check with the ROV, so soon after BP's denials of the new oil spills in late August 2011? How could BP be serious about finding the truth of the new oil spills if they had already outright rejected any connection to the Macondo Wells and blowout in April 2010. I do not blame my contacts and those gulf-truthers who had been working hard to get my assessment verified. BP should know better than to come up with this trick of “urgent requests” at the very last minute. I am sure they had the research-survey cruise planned months ago.
17. There was no excuse for such a last minute request on 30^th Aug 2011: “BK, I need to know what needs to be looked at and photo'd to support your letters claims that oil is leeching from the fractures and fissures justifiying the concerns addressed in your letter. Do you know the GPS coordinates and location that need to be re visited with the discovery being requested. Time is critical as BP and USCG has assets there, trying to determine where the oil is coming from.”
18. But I was prepared. Instead of specific locations, I requested “routine systematic mapping” in which the survey lines were run on regular grid-lines with data scan overlapping and crossing each other. This is how all site surveys had been conducted. Many leading geohazards survey companies like Fugro had been caught cheating trying to beat the grid-line survey system. You can't since adulterating the data on some lines will lead to discrepancies on the other lines. It is like you can cheat on some lines some of the time but you cannot cheat on all the lines at the same time. But with single lines recce, you cannot tie in data from isolated lines. There is a lot of room for adulteration. Why waste millions of dollars on a survey that is going to be full of holes and open to serious technical contention?
19. BP's Macondo bathymetric chart was supposedly surveyed using an AUV with MBES. In truth, the chart was compiled from a surface single beam echo sounder, a secondary backup system in the event the AUV mounted MBES (primary system) failed to function. It is an industry-wide scam because leading geohazards survey companies get away with such crimes with impunity all the time. BP's erroneous Macondo bathymetric chart is one documented example of such a scam.
20. See http://bklim.newsvine.com/_news/2010/09/03/5039904-forensic-analysis-of-bps-bathymetric-chart
21. Struggling between airports and travelling with a high fever, I managed to send in my recommendation of a detailed AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) survey utilising multibeam echo sounder (MBES), seafloor mapping system using side scan sonar and sub-bottom profiling (4x4 pinger); all of which are standard site survey tools. See figures 161-1 and 2 which are self-explanatory.
22. My survey recommendation was the minimum to establish the link between between last years oil spew (scattered rov videos with adulterated coordinates), the seafloor and sub-seabed features with the recently observed oil slicks.
23. If we can establish where the past and recent oil had surfaced at the seabed, we can generally interpret the "migrating" and widening circles of new pathways since April 2010. This information would be critical in designing battle plans to solve the worsening periodic oil spills the Gulf is going to experience time and time again whenever there is shallow crustal adjustment. It is no coincidence the recent new spills followed the 5.8 (mag) 6km (depth) 23^rd Aug 2011 shallow quake 8 km SSW from Mineral, Virginia. The last major oil slicks were observed in mid to late March, following the great (9 mag) Japan quake on 11 March 2011.
24. Although data from the ongoing seafloor survey carried out by Okeanos Explorer since 1Sept 2011 are not yet available, the different emphasis in survey coverage is already telling.
25. The vessel's track history seemed to suggest a higher emphasis in the south-western edges of the Biloxi Dome, the southern edged of Whiting Dome and generally south of the Macondo prospects. While there may yet be geologically valid reasons for the emphasis south of the Macondo wells, the shelf edges 6 to 8 km north-west of Macondo Wells and the badly eroded north-western edges of Whiting Dome should at least be surveyed with some grid-lines (see areas A and B in figure 161-2, 161-2A and 161-3).
26. BP's vessels and drilling rigs had been observed working for quite some time in both areas (A & B) even after the well was supposedly capped in 15 July. The 22 mile long underwater plume (first denied by BP and later confirmed by many independent research cruises), was suspected to have originated from the cracks in the seafloor at these locations. By avoiding these critical areas, can the present survey investigation be truly objective and independent in investigating the truth of the Macondo Blowout?
27. Almost all the oil sightings are north of the Macondo wells, not south. Why did the survey deliberately (?) avoid the shelf edges north of Macondo to concentrate in the south? In March 2011, new oil spills were suspected to have come from "leaks in the seabed" north of the Matherhorn field. The shelf edges bordering the Mississippi-Alabama Shelf, appear pretty fractured with large crevices and in potential danger of sliding into gigantic submarine landslides. Submarine landslides are more effective in generating tsunami than quakes without significant landslides. Both the 2011 Japan and 2004 Sumatra Quakes had giant tsunamis due to the accompanying large submarine mass displacement.
28. If the Okeanos Explorer could afford to survey the shelf edge all along the West Florida Escarpment down to the Florida Keys, why can't BP or the organisers of the research-survey cruise spare some effort to survey the more "rugged" shelf edge bordering the Mississippi -Alabama Shelf where the new and past oil slicks had been observed?
29. Is the main objective of the BP-funded and probably BP-directed research-survey cruise, to reconnaissance for naturally occurring oil/gas seeps and other geological data to substantiate and distance the new-found oil slicks from the Gulf Oil Spill disaster that originated from the Macondo Blowout on 20 April 2010? Could the main objective be looking for any evidence to absolve BP from living up to their legal obligations; rather than seeking the truth?
30. These are my expressed concerns following numerous inquiries on the "strange" course of action taken by NOAA. NOAA can survey every inch of the Gulf seafloor for the next 30 years (for all we care) but should the priority not be determining the linkage and long term consequence of the Macondo Blowout first?