BP is now fighting the Environmental Protection Agency’s demands to change its use of toxic dispersants, after over 700,000 gallons have been used on the hundred-million-gallon Deepwater Horizon oil blowout. The dispersants have created an invisible toxic cloud of unknown size below the surface, as the federal government lets BP block attempts to monitor the gusher, study the undersea plumes, or learn about the dispersants being used. On Monday, Good Morning America correspondent Sam Champion and Philippe Cousteau Jr., the chief ocean correspondent for Planet Green and grandson of Jacques Cousteau, explored the toxic plumes of dispersed oil floating beneath the waves in the Gulf of Mexico:
This, critics say, is what BP does not want you to see: oil and chemical dispersants swirling together into a toxic soup, forming large plumes under the surface of the water as deep as twenty-five feet, perhaps deeper.
The small droplets of dispersed oil are “capable of passing right into the flesh of fish and birds.” “It’s absolutely disgusting,” Cousteau described. “I think this has got to be one of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen underwater.”
(Source: ABC-TV and ThinkProgress.org)
