Even though the leakage has been stopped, the oil residue that remains in the Gulf, and what it could yet potentially do next, has been consistently the number one topic of interest for FAR web-site readers, concerned about where it could wind up in the not too distant future.

See my Report in the Prophecies and Portents Series—Gulf Oil Spill Mega-Disaster Now Unfolding—Did Nostradamus Foresee This Event Over 450 Years Ago?

What has made the present situation far worse is that environmental scientists are finding evidence that the nearly two million gallons of chemical dispersants utilized by British Petroleum to try to breakup the floating crude have worked too well.

In effect, the oily mess is now spread out, forming into tiny barely visible and odorless petroleum particulates that remain in several places suspended in the Gulf water column as gargantuan plumes all the way down to nearly half a mile deep, and extending outward from the capped drill site up to 22 miles in length, moving with the tides and currents.

The plumes exist at depths where the cold temperatures are preventing the residue from being consumed by oil-eating microbes, causing the mass to persist for far longer than normal. With such a greatly retarded biodegradation, this means the particulates are now infecting the entire sea food chain, especially plankton, which forms the foundation of the Gulf’s web of life.

And because the overall mass of crude will not be disappearing very soon, this will be a problem that will continue to linger perhaps for a very long time. Monty Graham, an ecologist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, who has been involved with the ongoing environmental impact study, noted:

“We absolutely should be concerned that this material is drifting around for who knowns how long. They say months in the research papers, but more likely we’ll be able to track this stuff for years.”

In addition, some of the material has already begun to slowly settle on the Gulf sea floor in observable layers, permanently poisoning all bottom-feeding creatures.

Making matters even more serious, the BP chemical dispersants—especially the most used highly lethal compound called Corexit—has now been determined to actually be signficantly increasing the toxicity of the existing oil residue itself by many fold.

According to toxocologist Sergio Alex Villalobos, “Once it’s mixed with oil, that’s where you get the most impact, that’s where you see most of the toxicity.”

Investigators agree that not only is the combination of these two elements—dispersants and petroleum—especially deadly for existing sea life struggling to remain alive amid all the massive pollution, but its toxic effects can be passed on to the next generations of marine offspring.

This recent finding is especially bad news to the Gulf’s commercial fishing industry, which hoped to start recovering their present total losses by this time next year.

Of greatest threat is what is going to take place when a full-fledged hurricane finally blows into the Gulf. The present storm season has barely begun, and there is growing concern of what could happen when the inevitable coming major winds and tidal surges stir up the remaining slicks on the surface, as well as the subsurface plumes and the submarine layers on the sea floor.

The worry is this still lurking mass of toxic particulates could be churned up and driven far inland, contaminating forests, farms and land life over a wider area.

Not only this, but the particulates are now getting microscopic enough to be evaporated, carried aloft and could eventually descend in rain droplets transported by storm clouds across the North American continent and beyond. If this residue is already considered to be poisonous to life in the Gulf, what effect is it going to have on crops and livestock?

Adding to the situation, computer projections predict that the present oil plumes could move out of their present locations via the Loop Stream and begin entering the Gulf Stream by October, eventually contaminating the American East coast beaches and fisheries from Miami to Cape Hattaras. Within a year, the residue could also be carried across the Atlantic to the fishing banks and shorelines of Europe and North Africa.

From there, if evaporated and transported skyward by Atlantic winter storms, the toxic materials could be spread over the entire Northern Hemisphere. A major portion of the grown food production for the planet would then be vulnerable.

As Nostradamus forewarned in several of his prophetic quatrains, the “blackened sea” and the “strong wave” that will carry “fish and other land and sea life by force” up onto the shore, dead and dying because the waters “will appear strange, oily and horrible”—this could be a prelude to an even greater more global disaster.

He foresaw the real possibility that many existing species of both domesticated animals and agricultural plants presently used as major food sources for feeding the world’s multiplying human population could suddenly become extinct. What would likely follow within less than a generation is a massive world-wide famine that Nostradamus predicted would last for almost two centuries—a universal stavation followed by pandemic disease that would reduce the now burgeoning numbers of humankind by as much as two-thirds.

If what we have already done to ourselves in the Gulf—killing off an important supply of marine food sources—was to unexpectedly expand to include important landed food stocks as well, then Nostradamus’ prophetic scenario could manifest before we fully understood what was really happening.

As always, however, the seer stressed in his prophetic messages that we still are given choices as to what happens to us, based on our actions or inactions in our ever-changing present moment. The future is by no means fixed or inevitable, but is composed of different possible outcomes.

Future potentialities are revealed to us beforehand so that we have an opportunity, if we so choose, to change the directions we are going, and alter things to come for the better.

With knowledge comes responsibility. With responsibility comes choice. And with choice comes the future of our own making or unmaking.

There is no greater power in the universe than our ability to choose. The question is, what do we choose to do collectively right now?

 

[Copyright 2010. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]