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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He estimated about 70 percent of the oil would stay on the water's surface, but the rest would sink to the seabed, where he said it would contaminate the sea and marine life.
Instead of remaining concentrated at the surface, dispersed oil pollutes the entire water column.
First, though, he had to dive through a 40-foot vertical patch of murky, water-oil mixture that began 20 feet below the surface.
There are some systems that actually will take a circle and drop it just below the surface of the water and have the oil kind of flow into it, almost like a drain, recover it and pump it out.
Trying to stop the flow of an oil gusher 5000 feet below the surface in extremely cold water is a complex engineering challenge as was the original exploration, drilling, and construction of the oil rig in the first place.
And soon, nearly a mile beneath the surface of the ocean, oil began spewing into the water.
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Rather, as a consequence of injecting water and sand into the shale formation to crack the rocks so gas and oil will flow, massive amounts of waste water comes back to the surface with significant amounts of contaminants as a result of leaching out salt, heavy metals and trace amounts of radioactive materials from the rock formation itself.
Until recently, oil and gas produced from deep-water fields have been brought to the surface and transported to onshore processing facilities.
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Geological forces lifted these oil-bearing rocks up toward the surface of the earth, within reach of water and bacteria.
This is a molecule or molecular combination that has different properties on different parts of its surface: in particular, one part prefers to dissolve in water whereas another part prefers oil.
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