BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico]

The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on april 21, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico was without question a human tragedy. The day after the rig finally sank on April 22, the Coast Guard called off the search for the 11 workers was lost during the accident (planetgreen.discovery.com).

The accident has threatened to become an environmental tragedy as well. Despite early wants that the oil spill could be minimized, the rig's fractured drilling pipe is currently leaking 42,000 gal, of crude a day. The result was an oil slick on the surface of the water, covering more than 1,800 sq. miles, now just 20 miles from the dainty Gulf coastline. Depending on breeze conditions, oil could begin washing up on the seashore as early as this weekend. "If it holds going and that's a large-scale if — the probability gets higher and higher that you could have a major influence on the land," states Nancy Kinner, co-director of the Coastal answer Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

The Coast Guard and the energy giant BP, which operated the sunken rig and is responsible for the cleanup, has launched a massive operation to contain the spill was an unusual challenge, considering the complexity of underwater drilling. First, remote-controlled robot submarines have been deployed to try to close off the oil well altogether by triggering a massive apparatus called a blowout preventer. If the 450-ton valve at the wellhead can be turned on, the oil flow should stop, and the spill could be ended quickly (funkydowntown.com). But the conclusion is far from guaranteed; robots have never been utilised in an operation of this magnitude nor at this deepness some 5,000 ft. below the exterior of the ocean.

Even as the robots do their work (officials should know inside a day if the robots were successful), BP is preparing to drill a respite well into which the original well would empty. Thead covering could allow the business to inject a heavy fluid into the broken well that would slow and finally stop the flow of oil. Once the leak is stanched, BP could permanently seal the first well (www.phongpo.com).

By any assess, drilling for oil and gas offshore is one of America's most unsafe professions. The dangers are unavoidable: employees are on move for an mean of 12-hours a day dealing with highly combustible materials ...