BP can cap the blowout tomorrow, but the gases will continue to come out of the water for some incalculable period of time. The crude and natural gas are made up of hundreds and hundreds of chemicals, atoms (mercury, for example). The compounds are in a dance, where the dancers are constantly changing from gases to liquids to solids and back and forth, changing with temperature, changing with pressure. One's boiling temperature is the other's liquifying temperature. If you could follow one molecule or compound up out of the hole, it might rise through the 5000 feet of water as a liquid and pop out of the sea as a gas, float over to the coast, liquify or solidify, heat up again and float off as a gas. The word "gas" comes from the Greek word "chaos." The constant interchange among the gas, liquid and solid states is the real "chaos." The dance goes on with big changes during the course of a day. The sun heats up the solid tar ball on a beach and out pops a gas. The sun sets, the gas cools and floats up the skeptic's nose.
I hear some try to refute the concern about gas as a problem, but simply noting that the gases "dissipate." What a convenient word. What a denial word. Dissipate? To where? Into a baby's lungs? No more gases. They are all gone now. Where are they? Oh, the babies are carrying them around in their lungs. Hydrogen Sulfide, benzene and others that are much worse. Dissipated for how long? A gas can dissipate for a few minutes or days and reappear as a liquid or solid. So, what does the skeptic call this reappearance of the "dissipated" gas?
Slide Show of Gases
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