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This video is of the larger of the two holes. The opening is about a meter and a half in diameter, about 1500 meters below the sea surface. The 100-meter-long drilling rig Deepwater Horizon blew up nearly a month ago, 20 April, sinking on the 22nd and eventually coming to rest nearly half a kilometer away. Eleven employees are missing; reduced by the fires to a journalistic footnote and many blackened pieces (don't worry, they can always sue the company for damages).
BP has already tried capping the leak with a huge underwater building. But it clogged up with methane ice. At the time of this writing they're working on using a smaller, top-hap-looking funnel-style device to gather oil, and plan to subsequently fill up and plug the leak. The work is done using remotely-operated robotic submarines and boats with winches.
The question of just how much oil is shooting out of the ocean floor is receiving substantial discussion in the press. Barack Obama feels it doesn't make a difference; that the only important problem is how to stop the flow as soon as possible. He's reported having harshly criticized the corporate leadership at BP, Transocean, and Halliburton for wasting critical time in conference with legislators on what I imagine to be pansy-assed finger-pointing. I don't know what I'd do in the position of a BP or Transocean VIP. I hope I'd submit a mea culpa to the whole world, a full disclosure, using The New York Times, or the like. And resign comfortably to Virginia and play with my kids.
Obviously the volume of the oil makes a great deal of difference. There's currently a colossal range in the various figures offered by scientists and press releases. That's a problem because the number of hundreds of billions of dollars we (the United States, the world at large) waste, through our government(s) and in losses to our developed economic investments in the Gulf of Mexico, on a mess created by a for-profit corporation, will be proportional to the amount of oil that moves uncontrolled from under the sea floor to the open ocean. It is helpful to have a grounded understanding of what the problem is from early on. Otherwise it's impossible to formulate realistic goals and expectations. People need to see an end in sight or they fumble helplessly.
Do not exaggerate our capability to fix things, do not underestimate the damage we've done, do not tell the public to distrust the scientific community. If you consider yourself a member of the scientific community, tell it straight. You need to drain the agenda out of your speech. You need to stop playing public relations.
When will we stop depending on hindsight for our answers, our solutions to complex problems? Like the eleven who didn't make it off Deepwater Horizon, who never learned the full consequences of their work, we won't always have that option.
Today I'm predicting the worst manmade environmental disaster yet to end relatively shortly, in an unspectacular way, for everyone who does not live on the Gulf of Mexico. A lot of people over there will be out of work, a lot of species over there will be extinct, a lot of everyone's time and effort will be wasted. From the perspective of the rest of the world: the numbers are too huge to be important and press activity will reflect the average consumer's incuriosity for them. Doesn't matter much if hurricanes make it worse, if the sea floor cracks open like god's wrath, if the whole gulf catches like a gas can.