They were still warm, perfectly crunchy, and had a shimmer of oil on the surface.
So there will still be oil on the surface the day the well is capped.
The initial estimates that were done used overhead photography to measure the amount of oil on the surface, right?
Human efforts and natural degradation did remove most of the oil, but some areas still have oil under the surface.
The established industry technique of waterflooding brings more oil to the surface.
According to a web tool that puts the slick over your home region, the vast area of surface oil is now bigger than Massachusetts, Connecticut and Long Island combined.
Rear Adm Mary Landry said crews saw an area measuring one mile by five miles (1.5km by 8km) of what appeared to be oil on the surface of the water.
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projected that winds will continue through Saturday to push oil on the surface of the Gulf toward barrier islands along the Mississippi and Alabama coasts.
While some shrimpers are eager to get back out, many are still working for BP, which has hired boats to skim oil off the surface and lay protective booms along the shorelines.
And then you subtract from that the burning that has been done with the platform and the oil on the surface with the controlled burn, for example -- the application of dispersants, skimming operations and in situ.
And what I mean by that is we believe that the cap will work just fine in the containment, that through a couple of different areas, that cap will take oil to the surface as well as to the choke and kill lines.
So depending on when the oil came to the surface, under what environmental conditions, could have created a small batch of oil and moved it one direction, then another one another direction.
Dealing with the oil spill on the surface is going to go on for a couple of months.
It quickly became obvious, however, that there was more oil accumulating at the surface than would be possible at that flow rate.
If this seep is new and big, then it could probably be dealt with by reopening the well and going back to siphoning the oil up to the surface.
Smit, which in charge of salvaging Prestige before it sank, said the operation - to pump the oil back to the surface - would cost nearly 50m euros and take several months to complete.
Chevron was slammed in the press for the accident, though the oil sheen was cleaned off the surface of the Atlantic in less than two weeks and no oil washed up on the famed Rio de Janeiro beaches.
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The oil would be pumped out to a platform on the surface as if it were an oil field.
Instead of remaining concentrated at the surface, dispersed oil pollutes the entire water column.
The result is a thin reflective layer that floats on the surface of the oil.
In terms of containment right now, the top cap is drawing oil and gas to the surface to -- from the LMR -- the lower marine riser cap to the Enterprise.
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"The dispersant is moving the oil down out of the surface and into the deeper waters, where it can affect phytoplankton and other marine life, " said John Paul, a marine microbiologist at the University of South Florida.
An interesting note in the financial statements was the news that in September Suncor become the first oil sands company to complete surface reclamation of a tailings pond, a key step in returning the site back to nature.
In the early days of oil and gas exploration, geologists would largely rely upon topology at the surface of the earth to interpret the location of oil and gas accumulations in the subsurface.
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The oil is so thick on the surface that ice from nearby Columbia glacier turned black.
These algae now release their oil, which floats to the surface of the culture vessel.
In the meantime, some of the leaking oil is being piped to the surface from a cap over part of the well.
Things get murkier still when oil companies drill deep below the surface of the ocean floor, since even robots can't go down there to see what's going on.
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