Fossils

The name Halliburton Energy Services Inc. comes up in one of the 31 current class action lawsuits pending against BP. Where there is the acrid smell of oil burning, you can bet you'll find Dick Cheney. The faulty equipment is, ironically enough, deemed with the moniker "the blowout preventer" (BOP), according to The Times. After the explosion, the blowout preventer was supposed to stop the drilling, but it failed and now scientists are trying to be stop it manually.

"The drilling occurs at one mile below the surface of the ocean, but spilled oil floats on the 'skin of water,'" I hear on a podcast.

Suddenly, I'm again sitting at the kitchen table doing a science experiment about density when I was three. The terminology stuck: I remember the phrase 'skin of water.' I remember it despite the fact that I was lured into doing a science experiment; it really was masquerading as a game. My mom put a penny, feather and piece of paper on the table. She bet me that I could make a penny float like paper and one of those cheerfully-dyed costume feathers.

The paper and feather obviously floated, but I predicted that the penny would sink. She told me to first drop it in the cup, plop!, it went down. She then gave me some tweezers and told me to lower it in carefully because the skin of water, or the strong bonds between the atoms on the surface that cause surface tension would hold it up.

The overall slight charge of the element itself is most strong in the top layer. The top layer only interacts with the molecules below it, so it has a slightly greater charge that forms the skin of water. Gravity will try to pull an object down, but if it doesn't break the surface tension or the strong bond, then it will float. Dubiously, I eventually got the penny to float. You have to delicately balance the needle on the top of the water, making those planar motions you make when building house of cards, balance.

Basically, the skin of water is caused by the polarity of the bonding molecules. While the water has gravity pulling it down and the molecules constantly interact, continually canceling out the charges of the bottom layers. Or, something like that. I was more preoccupied with dunking pennies in the water and the phraseology of the 'skin of water.' The human body is basically a skin of water, though my logodaedaly is slightly extended.

Oil, on the other hand, is hydrophobic. Oil spills are called 'slicks' for a reason. They're the reason why you don't die in the level Oil Ocean in Sonic the Hedgehog. It could spread around the tip of Florida and get into a current that feeds into the gulf stream. It seeps, it oozes, it waits.

Floating oil is not floating money, as BP found when their stock dropped by $20 billion. Back on April 20th, the offshore drilling rig caught ablaze and 11 workers were killed and others injured. After that began the struggle for damage control, both fiscally and for survival. The coast guard's helicopters are inveigled in the classic distance: speed: space metrics. Solving for space as quickly as possible profoundly impact the likelihood of survival.

The official estimate, the last I checked, was that 5,000 barrels of oil a day is leaking. In Alabama and Florida, beachfront property owners filed suits, especially in areas where the whiteness of the sand on the beach is some sort of indication of pedigree. In restaurants, the isolation innate to privilege will be conducive on the price of red snapper without the slightest comprehension of the causes.

In Nola, they wait for the oil to seep under the sheaths of water, gathering 5,000 feet down, oozing towards what you could call the levies, the sandy streets. A rig about 50 miles offshore exploded into a molten core as hot as the place where the fossils and Mnemosyne dwells, getting thicker, more stolid in its ways.