Oil In Ocean Shows Up On NASA Images: Half Of The Oil In The Ocean Bubbles Up Naturally From Seafloor (Massachusetts, administration)

[Miborn]

Oil In Ocean Shows Up On NASA Images: Half Of The Oil In The Ocean Bubbles Up Naturally From Seafloor

ScienceDaily (Feb. 20, 2009) — About half of the oil in the ocean bubbles up naturally from the seafloor, with Earth giving it up freely like it was of no value.

Scientists recently found black gold bubbling up from an otherwise undistinguished mass of ocean imagery.
Chuanmin Hu, an optical oceanographer at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, and colleagues from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth (UMass), found that they could detect oil seeping naturally from the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico by examining streaks amid the reflected sunlight on the ocean's surface.

Most researchers usually discard such "sun glint" data as if they were over-exposed photos from a camera.
"Significant sun glint is sometimes thought of as trash, particularly when you are looking for biomass and chlorophyll," said Hu. "But in this case, we found treasure."

Oil In Ocean Shows Up On NASA Images: Half Of The Oil In The Ocean Bubbles Up Naturally From Seafloor



But hey lets not harvest it and use it here in America our Gov would rather buy it!