Finding Oil with Death

For this blog post I read an article by Robin Nixon, a writer for the "livescience" webpage, about the negatives of how people are finding oil today and what that can do to animals. I will discuss these procedures and provide my opinion of weather or not the benefit of oil outweighs the death of helpless creatures.

An easy way for geologists to make an "educated guess" of where oil lies beneath the ocean floor is to send out seismic waves. Companies such as PGS (Petroleum Geo-Services) use these seismic waves to find oil. Those seismic waves hit the ocean ground and then bounce back reveling if there is a  possible oil reserve in the area. The bad thing about this is that those waves distort and confuse whales and other marine life causing mass beachings and/or death. In addition, as I said previously, the seismic wave system only provides people with an educated guess, meaning that even when the waves detect a possible reserve it is not always actually an oil reserve. I personally do not think that an educated guess of where oil reserves are is worth the death of hundreds of marine animals.

http://www.theguardian.com

Recently a pipeline was installed that goes throughout the Alaskan wilderness. Normally just a pipeline wouldn't do much to an animal besides disturbing the natural feel of it's environment, but what made this one such a problem was the location of where it was placed. Polar bears, caribou, and other animals need to cross where that pipeline is to give birth. Birth is the most vulnerable time of any animals' life and any disturbance in that natural cycle can have devastating effects. I think that it's awful to disrupt such an animal in such a delicate state. Especially when the animal is very endangered, such as the polar bear.

Animals that live near oil wells may be exposed to a chemical called PAH. Most of the time this chemical is quickly flushed from the animals' system but in the case of a panicked immune response to PAH the animal may get cancer. This is most common in marine situations where humans close to the shore rely on fishing etc. to make a living. Not to mention the cancerous deaths of several species of marine animals. Basically what the oil companies are saying is that their profit is more important than the salaries of hundreds of fishermen which, in my opinion, is not okay.

In my future posts I hope to learn more about how human pollution effects marine animals.