Scientists question BP spill report

WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 (UPI) -- Many scientists have questioned the findings of a U.S. government report that says the "vast majority" of the spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico has been dispersed or removed from the water.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report released Wednesday on the BP oil spill says 33 percent of the oil -- an estimated 4.9 million barrels -- has been burned, skimmed, dispersed or directly recovered by cleanup operations.

Another 25 percent has evaporated into the atmosphere or dissolved in the ocean, and 16 percent has been dispersed via natural breakup of the oil into microscopic droplets, it states.

The remaining 26 percent, the report says, is still either on or just below the surface, has washed ashore or been collected from shores, or is buried along the coasts.

"The blanket statement that the public understood is that most of the oil has disappeared. That is not true. About 50 percent of it is still in the water," Susan Shaw, a marine toxicologist and director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, told The Guardian newspaper.

She criticized the Obama administration for too quickly declaring that the oil was gone.

Scientists say that the fluid nature of the ocean makes it hard to track the oil.

Bill Lehr, a NOAA scientist and one of the report's authors, told The Washington Post that the analysis relied on assumptions based on previous spills in the gulf.

Another professor who collaborated on the report told the Post "we don't have the foggiest idea" how to measure the oil with such precision as stated in the report.

University of South Florida chemical oceanographer David Hollander characterized the NOAA findings as "ludicrous," National Geographic News reports.

He said 75 percent of the oil is still not accounted for.

While the report considers all submerged oil to be dispersed and therefore not harmful, Hollander said that is not necessarily true because little is known about the effects of oil and dispersants at great depths of water.

A lot of the research "is based on modeling and extrapolation and very generous assumptions," Samantha Joye, a marine scientist at the University of Georgia, told The New York Times.

"If an academic scientist put something like this out there, it would get torpedoed into a billion pieces," Joye said of the report.

Even NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco admitted that "nobody is saying [the oil] isn't a threat anymore," The Hill newspaper in Washington reports.

"Diluted and out of sight doesn't necessarily mean benign," she said.