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"Crude oil's toxic ingredients (alone) can damage every system in the body." Combined with dispersants, the potential risk increases exponentially.
Natural Gas Containing Methane - A Potentially Far Greater Threat
Natural gas contains from 75 - 90% methane. It's also a constituent of oil, about 40% of Macondo well emissions, compared to around 5% in other deposits, creating a potentially far greater disaster, including:
-- oxygen-depleted "dead zones" throughout the Gulf in which animal and plant life can't survive; and
-- a possible "massive bubble trapped for thousands of years under the Gulf of Mexico sea floor," warns DK Matai, exploding and unleashing a high-speed "tsunami" endangering the entire Gulf coastline, especially Florida,
followed by a "second tsunami via vaporization," producing a massive hot cavity able to vaporize water into steam, causing another seabed rupture.
Terrance Aym calls it a possible, though low probability, "world-killing event....an irreversible, cascading geological Apocalypse that will culminate with the first mass extinction of life on Earth in many millions of years."
Biochemical engineer Gregory Ryskin suggests "oceans periodically produce massive eruptions of explosive methane gas," based on scientific evidence, the last mass extinction occurring 55 million years ago. Other geologist agree that "The consequences of a methane-driven oceanic eruption for marine and terrestrial life are likely to be catastrophic."
Warning signs include large seabed fissures, a rise in seafloor elevation, and "the massive venting of methane and other gases....All....occurring in the Gulf," the Macondo well its epicenter in which methane is pressurized at 100,000 pounds psi. Other fissures have also been spotted as distant as 30 miles from ground zero.
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