Fish living in Gulf of Mexico marshes exposed to last year’s oil spill have undergone cellular changes that could lead to developmental and reproductive problems, a group of researchers reported Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[...]

[Principal Investigator Andrew]Whitehead said the results show that just because fish from the gulf have passed federal inspections, it does not mean these species are unaffected by the spill.

“You can have a fish that’s safe to eat but is still not healthy,” he said, adding that as sediment containing hydrocarbons is dredged up by storms, it could expose species over time. “The sediments are going to act as this long-term reservoir of oil, of potential exposure.”

Apart from the possibility of damage and loss of life unrelated to the oil spill, there is a very obvious downside to hurricanes passing near the source of the oil spill.

A hurricane would clearly disrupt the efforts to stop the leak, although BP has a plan to install a device in order to quickly disconnect and reconnect the link down to the spill site in high winds. On shore, tasks like the laying of boom and rescue of wildlife would become more problematic.

But what would happen to the oil that is already out there floating in the sea?

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"It is potentially not a pretty picture," says Prof Nan Walker, an oceanographer at the School of the Coast and Environment at LSU.

"A real concern is that because Louisiana is so low-lying, even a category one storm can raise the water level eight or 10 feet.

"There is potential for oil to go fairly far inland, penetrating the marshes even deeper. It makes the problem potentially a lot worse."

The sand berms, or barriers, that have been planned in Louisiana may not stop even a relatively small storm surge.

A large rotating cyclone of cold water is pushing into the southern body of the Gulf of Mexico's Loop Current and now appears likely to destabilize or even sever the current and the oil it contains from its connection to Florida, scientists said today.

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[I]magery today has shown that, while filaments of oil have escaped into the current, "the main pool of oil is remaining up there in the eddy" and not progressing south, said Mitch Roffer, an oceanographer at the scientific consulting firm ROFFS.

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Typically, a forceful counterclockwise cyclone near southwest Florida "punches through the Loop Current," severing the flow from its connection to the Atlantic, said Nan Walker, the director of the Earth Scan Lab at Louisiana State University's School of the Coast and Environment.

"It looks like that kind of scenario is imminent," Walker said.

[...] 

"At this stage, it's a watch and waiting game," Walker said.  
 

"Images from the past few days show a "big, wide tongue" of oil reaching south from the main area of the spill, off the coast of Louisiana, said Nan Walker, director of Louisiana State University's Earth Scan Laboratory, in the School of the Coast and Environment."

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"The oil has also reached the point where the eddy connects to the Loop Current, Walker said. That means the oil is traveling eastward alongside the main stream of the Loop Current, and it's likely that it will continue flowing with the current to Florida, Walker said."

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Satellite images shed light on the trajectory of the oil and the current. The image above shows the oil spill as observed from space by the NASA Satellites Terra and Aqua on Monday. Using an array of sensors, these satellites detect the spectral reflection of the ocean, allowing a wide variety of observations on things like water temperature and surface features like the oil spill.

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“It’s highly visible in our imagery,” said Nan Walker, an oceanographer with the Earth Scan Laboratory at Louisiana State University, where a separate analysis of the satellite images is being done. “It’s unmistakable. And oil spills, to my mind, aren’t usually that easy to track.” 
 

An undersea conveyor belt to Florida is approaching the Gulf Coast oil spill, and should it stretch past its typical bounds, oil from the BP PLC accident, blobbing placidly off the Louisiana coast, could soon stream into the Florida Keys and up the United States' Eastern Seaboard.

Or the current could miss the spill entirely.

For the current to begin conveying the oil at any volume, it would still have to surge much farther north, which some computer models like Weisberg's are predicting. However, as Weisberg confesses, many of these models are deeply flawed, and the behavior of the Loop Current -- when it will decide to surge or instead break apart -- is prohibitively complex to forecast.

In other words, "no one has really been able to predict with much accuracy what the Loop Current will do," said Nan Walker, the director of the Earth Scan Laboratory at Louisiana State University, who is monitoring the oil and current with several sets of satellite data.

Inside the National Weather Service office in Slidell, Louisiana (map), data screens are showing clear skies over the Gulf of Mexico.

But lead forecaster Robert Ricks, who's coordinating 12-hour emergency shifts to provide information to people combating the Gulf oil spill, knows not to drop his guard.

"Just when you think everything's fine—that's when it can go wrong," said Ricks, who was also on duty in 2005 as Hurricane Katrina pummeled Slidell.

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"Say the oil spill remained and [another] Katrina hit," said Nan Walker, a physical oceanographer at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. "The oil could be propelled onto land by the storm surge and monster waves."

Ron Kendall, chair of the Department of Environmental Toxicology at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, made a more dire prediction: "You put a major hurricane in there, you’re liable to have oil in downtown New Orleans."

Complex interactions between the ocean and overlying atmosphere cause hurricanes to form, and also have a tremendous amount of influence on the path, intensity and duration of a hurricane or tropical weather event. As researchers develop new ways to better understand and predict the nature of individual storms, a largely unstudied phenomenon has caught the attention of scientists at LSU’s Earth Scan Laboratory, or ESL. Cool water upwellings occurring within ocean cyclones following alongside and behind hurricanes are sometimes strong enough to reduce the strength of hurricanes as they cross paths.

Nature doesn't always know when to quit--and nothing says that quite like a hurricane. The atmospheric convulsion that was Hurricane Katrina had barely left the Gulf Coast before its sister Rita was spinning to life out in the Atlantic. In the three weeks between them, five other named storms had lived and died in the warm Atlantic waters without making the same headlines their ferocious sisters did. With more than two months left in the official hurricane season, only Stan, Tammy, Vince and Wilma are still available on the National Hurricane Center's annual list of 21 storm names. If the next few weeks go like the past few, those names will be used up too, and the storms that follow will be identified simply by Greek letters. Never in the 52 years we have been naming storms has there been a Hurricane Alpha.

If 2005 goes down as the worst hurricane season on record in the North Atlantic, it will join 2004 as one of the most violent ever. And these two seasons are part of a trend of increasingly powerful and deadly hurricanes that has been playing out for more than 10 years. Says climatologist Judy Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology: "The so-called once-in-a-lifetime storm isn't even once in a season anymore."

Head-snapping changes in the weather like this inevitably raise the question, Is global warming to blame? For years, environmentalists have warned that one of the first and most reliable signs of a climatological crash would be an upsurge in the most violent hurricanes, the kind that thrive in a suddenly warmer world. Scientists are quick to point out that changes in the weather and climate change are two different things. But now, after watching two Gulf Coast hurricanes reach Category 5 in the space of four weeks, even skeptical scientists are starting to wonder whether something serious might be going on.

"There is no doubt that climate is changing and humans are partly responsible," says Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate-analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. "The odds have changed in favor of more intense storms and heavier rainfalls." Says NCAR meteorologist Greg Holland: "These are not small changes. We're talking about a very large change."

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It's not just warmer water on the surface that's powering the hurricanes; deeper warm water is too--at least in the Gulf of Mexico. Extending from the surface to a depth of 2,000 ft. or more is something scientists call the Loop Current, a U-shaped stream of warm water that flows from the Yucatán Straits to the Florida Straits and sometimes reaches as far north as the Mississippi River delta. Hurricanes that pass over the Loop typically get an energy boost, but the extra kick is brief, since they usually cross it and move on. But Rita and Katrina surfed it across the Gulf, picking up an even more powerful head of steam before slamming into the coastal states. Even if those unlucky beelines had been entirely random, the general trend toward warmer Gulf water may well have made the Loop even deadlier than usual.

"We don't know the temperature within the Loop Current," says Nan Walker, director of Louisiana State University's Earth Scan Laboratory. "It's possible that below the surface, it's warmer than normal. This needs to be investigated."