THE OIL CATACLYSM OF 2010. HOW COULD IT HAPPEN?

Yuri MAGARSHAK
Yugene LEVICH

WILL THE OIL SPILL IN MEXICAN BAY TRANSFORM TROPICAL HURRICANE INTO A HUGE OIL AND FIRE VORTEX STORM?

Thrillers stirring our deeply hidden fears and at the same time exciting our imagination are universally popular. Invasion of Martians by Wells, Aliens and Predators Independence Day Hollywood's soul scratcher, or post-apocalyptic Planet of Apes and so on and so forth. However cataclysm that may be triggered by the recent oil spill in Mexican Bay, or similar man made disasters that may fall upon us in the future can eclipse the most creative imagination. And what is sad is that the awesome cataclysmic horrors may be caused by our own uncontrollable meddling with the Earth's environment, by reckless exploitation of Earth's resources.

Let us describe a scenario of such Man Made disaster that may affect a densely populated area surrounding the Mexican Bay, apocalypses that would delegate the Last Day of Pompeii to insignificant historical accidents. We shall try to write a script for the cataclysmic disaster objectively and realistically, not as if it must happen, but as a potential danger that must be thoroughly analyzed based on scientific knowledge and experience of qualified experts.

The growing oil spill that started on the oil platform of British Petroleum is actually a fountain of oil streaming out under pressure from the deep underwater oil field.In principle, unless plugged tightly, this fountain can continue pouring oil to the ocean's surface indefinitely, or for at least as long as it will take for the oil field to be emptied. The potential quantities of oil spilled out are horrendous.

The problem is that the oil spill is in the region frequented by tropical storms every fall. The core of a tropical storm is a giant vortex in many ways similar to a huge tornado. This vortex will be sucking in everything that is on the surface over which it is passing. What will happen if this vortex will go over the oil spill? It seems not impossible that the oil will be sucked in together with the adjusting water. The proportion of oil and water that will enter the core of the vortex cannot be predicted out of hand and should be calculated in the framework of a sensible model. But is it possible that large amount of oil will be sucked into the funnel of this gigantic tornado? It seems yes. Common sense then tells one that the result can be truly catastrophic.

To start with the amount of spilled oil is incredible, tens of thousands of tons of oil. If it is sucked into the funnel this will mean that all of it will be lifted to about 5 km up into the lower atmosphere forming a large column of oil mixed with water. It should be pointed out that the sucking force of the vortex is enormous. It is well known that the whole sailing ships were ascended high up by the storms and brought back down far away from the place of ascension. Sometimes even with surviving crew.

The mixture of oil and water can hold days in the vortex and then pour out on land all over the path of the storm. It can take hundreds of miles over land for the hurricane to lose its fierce power. Therefore hundreds of square miles of land, fields, forests, farms and cities can be thoroughly and densely polluted by huge amounts of oil.

To make the picture even grimmer let us remind that the heat conduction coefficient of oil is much lower than that for water, by a factor of 3-4 approximately. It seems probable therefore that the oil spot, which extends by about 100 m into the oceans depth, like a column, will be relatively warmer than that of surrounding Caribbean sea water. At the same time it is known that tropical storms are virtually attracted to warm spots in the ocean, so-called warm mirrors, ostensibly due to a more extensive convection associated with the warm spots. Light oil will produce convective columns up the air even better than water. Hence it may be that the storm vortex will be attracted by the oil spot. Convection from Warm Ocean is the food on which hurricanes get even more powerful and so the vortex will intensify after passing over the warm oil spot.

But how much oil and water the storm can hold? Let us remind that so-called cumulus cloud holds for hours and longer hundreds thousands of tons of water that eventually pours down on Earth. This is at least how much oil mixed with water can be poured down on land by a storm. If to recall that, for instance Iristate Tornado of March 18th, 1925 with a funnel diameter of about 1000 m, passed 350 km over Missouri, Illinois and Indiana in 3.5 hours, it may become possible to understand what would have happened if this had been the oil saturated tornado. The consequences of a more powerful oil storm would-be even more awesome. Dense layer of oil will cover thousands of square miles of Earth's surface . How to remove this oil from the Earth's surface and what time and effort it takes to do is a task of such a scale that has not ever confronted our civilization before.

The above is a rather optimistic scenario. The cataclysmic development would be if the mixture of oil and water in the storm would be flammable. And would it not be? The turbulent mixture will be a mixture of small droplets of oil, air and water, a perfectly inflammable mixture, it seems, that may flare up like the fuel drizzle in a combustion chamber. If such fire storm will go over Florida, or New Or lean, reader himself/herself can imagine the consequences. Everything will be burned down to ash. The images of some artists, modern movie Directors and Biblical Prophets would appear quite realistic and up to date.

Artificial fire tornadoes have been created for research and potential military purposes since 1960. In particular by J. Dessens in Sahara. Naturally they can happen as a result of a big fire or volcano eruption. In Australian forests they are quite a regular phenomenon. The modeling of the fire tornadoes was considered by a number of researchers. Still it seems no one tried to imitate the possibility of fire storms caused by a coincidence of a massive oil spill, hurricane and ignition thereof. Such scenarios have not been imagined so far.

The physics and mechanics of the fire tornadoes is easy to understand. The air density over the zone of fire ignition decreases because of the heat. The pressure drops and the low density air is replaced by a cold air entering from the fire boundaries inside the tornado funnel while the hot air ascends from the surface. Oxygen is sucked inside the funnel and further enhances he fire. Air currents form spirals extending to the height of several km. The air speed in the funnel is over 100km/hour and the temperature rises to 600 Centigrades. The tornado is expired only when all flammable material in the zone where it strikes is burned out or melted. Such firestorm was caused in history by the bombardment of Hamburg in 1943 by the British Air force. The temperature in the zone of fire tornado was indeed about600 Centigrades or more. All life was burned to ashes, bricks melted and buildings collapsed, people in the shelters suffocated. The rescue works could be started only a week after the bombardment, so high was the temperature in the zone of the strike.

We want to be optimistic and find good reasons that would lower the probability or make impossible the doomsday scenario imagined above. For instance the oil layer over the water surface prevents to some extent the water convection. But on the other hand light oil, typical for the Mexican Bay oil field, is disposed to convection itself. So what would be the balance cannot be preordained, it seems, without careful modeling.

There is another factor working against convection from the area covered by oil. Indeed oil is so called surface active substance=SAS. As such it smoothes the surface of the ocean by damping short wavelength waves, a phenomenon well known to sea farers for ages who would spill whales fat to temper the rough waves but proved scientifically not such a long time ago in the classical monography of Benjamin Levich {Physico-Chemical Hydrodynamics, Prentice Hall, 1962} The gist of the matter is that normally the ocean's surface is fractal, due to short wavelength waves and ripples. Effectively it means that the area of the surface is much larger as compared with what it would have been if the oceans surface was smooth. The fractality of ocean's surface can be likened to the fractality of the shoreline of England. It is well known that the effective length of shoreline of England when measured with the accuracy of say microns is enormous, much larger than perceived by looking at the map. Likewise when observed from the satellites with high resolution cameras on board the area of the ocean's surface is large due to the small scale waves and ripples. Oil dampens the ripples and thus the area of the surface becomes much less. In consequence the convection intensity becomes less. The hope is that the storm would not see the oil spot as a usual water warm spot with enhanced convection and may avoid it by changing its path towards the usual warm spots of water characterized by anomalously active convection.

We note in passing that the fractal nature of ocean's surface and associated large water area of the surface is normally beneficial for environment enhancing oxygen, dioxide and water vapors exchange between the ocean and atmosphere.

However the arguments against catastrophic scenario described above fail to put our fears to rest entirely. There is a possibility that a hurricane on approach to the oil spot would suck all of it, or a big part of it and thus clear up the water surface and allow the normal convection of water to proceed unimpeded and further enhance the hurricane funnel. Ignition of the oil droplets intermixed with water droplets and air may be possible by a lightning or just by passing over high voltage electrical lines on land. This ignition would enhance the power of the storm even further.

It is reminded that tropical hurricanes are most important for mixing the global air masses, making the temperature and humidity over the globe tolerable for life. They also interact with the ocean currents, such as Gulfstream. Therefore a global scale cataclysm seems possible, unless convincingly disproved by a thorough scientific investigation.

Conclusions that we derive from the above scenario are the following:

1. Possibility of oil and even fire storm this fall of 2010, when the storm season in these latitudes commences, cannot be brushed away out of hand. It would be nice to think that this potential danger is a kind of fantasy giving food to our imagination. However such cavalier way of thinking would not be prudent and may be even irresponsible.

2. It is necessary to model the processes described above, have serious assessment of the threats and dangers of the current disaster and future similar or worse. International symposiums, conferences and meetings must be held, with experts on oil, oil drilling, geophysics, turbulence, combustion and other relevant disciplines discussing the dangers of tremendous, uncontrollable oil spills. If the dangers will be recognized as serious, potentially disastrous and probable, in this case all efforts and resources must be thrown into finding ways to prevent apocalyptic scenarios.

The situation is reminiscent of the one in the aftermath of thermonuclear H-bomb invention. Scientists then seriously analyzed the possibility of ignition of all hydrogen in the atmosphere that could have been caused by a Hydrogen bomb explosion. Thanks to Providence and laws of physics the answer was negative, It is our fervent hope that the results of serious scientific investigation of the Mexican Bay oil spill will deem impossible, or at least improbable an apocalyptic scenario of oil and fire storms.

Finally we would like to recall a famous Greek myth about 100 handed underground giants, Gekatonheyry, that managed to escape from the depths of Earth. Only united efforts of Gods and Titans barely succeeded herding the monsters back to their underground dwellings. Since then the monsters were thoroughly guarded to prevent their further escapes that could mortally endanger all life and soul on Earth.

It is sad that Humankind is so near-sighted and reckless that it creates with their own hands a situation described in nightmarish Greek myth. If we just recall that a storm or tornado releases energy comparable or more than the one of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima it is easy to imagine the level of destruction caused by a fire storm, We just cannot afford staying passive and indifferent when confronted by the scale of potential disasters described above.
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About the authors:
Yuri Magarshak:
Physicist, President of International Committee for Intellectual Collaboration (New York)
Eugene Levich:
Physicist and Engineer. Expert on turbulent flows, hurricanes and tornadoes (Tel Aviv)

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To the problem of the Generation of Oil Tornado and Fire-Oil Tornado
in the Mexican Gulf Region

Chapter II. Independent Experts Opinions

PROFESSOR OLEG FIGOVSKY (USA)
IS A MEMBER OF EUROPEAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, HEAD OF CHAIR OF UNESCO GREEN CHEMISTRY
1. Mixture of oil and water that may be sucked by a storm and will be rotating with the hurricane speed can flare up from a lightning that will stab through it forming many branches diverging in all directions, Such multi branch lightning structure is unfortunately ideal for ignition of combustible mixture. Equally dangerous are ball lightnings that also can form in the area affected by a hurricane.

2. It seems prudent that upon discovering the fire oil vortex it would be ignited artificially as far from the shores as possible. The possible explosion and eruptions into the atmosphere are incomparably less damaging than potential catastrophic destruction caused by the vortex if it travels over land.

3. I am profoundly disturbed that the oil well in Mexican Bay was not equipped with Automatically Locking system. Such systems is Law, in particular in Norway. They are installed in all underwater wells in Norway. In the US it is an obvious rule that must be followed by the oil companies drilling underwater wells. For some reason this rule was not made into Law.

4. The issues indicated above have not been seriously analyzed, since the fire tornado of the scale that may occur from the events in the Mexican Bay has not been imagined previously. A preliminary analysis indicates that there may be several ways in which a large fire tornado would evolve. What is clear however is that its energy would grow as combustion envelopes the whole volume of the vortex. It seems absolutely necessary to start immediate investigation of the problems caused by the uncontrollable oil spill in Mexican Bay. It is necessary to develop technologies based on knowledge and experience of independent and responsible experts in a number of relevant fields to liquidate the catastrophic threats stemming from the current oil spill caused by the reckless drilling by British Petroleum in Mexican Bay and to prevent future similar mistakes that may result in cataclysmic consequences.

ALEX BABCHIN, PH.D
IS THE DISTINGUISHED SCIENTIST, HEAVY OIL&OIL SANDS ALBERTA RESEARCH COUNCIL (EMERITUS)
EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA
Intense circular flow of air above the oil spill on water not only will lift the oil along with water residing in oil and under the oil, but will also disperse oil and water phases, forming aerosols of see water and crude oil. In this scenario oil and water are coexisting as tiny droplets of oil and water suspended in air. The reason for dispersion of liquids into colloidal droplets is the strong turbulence within the air. This effect is well known in Chemical Engineering, where turbulent flow is used for emulsification of one liquid in another.

In the tornado case the air acts as a continuous fluid phase, while oil and water represent two discontinuous phases. As it is well known from Colloid Science the aerosol droplets carry electric surface charges, usually negative in sign. These electric charges stabilise aerosol, as droplets repel from one another while in close proximity. Even clouds of water droplets alone are capable to cause the dielectric breakdown of air, well known in the form lightings. The dielectric breakdown of air is expected to be more pronounced in Oil-Water-Air colloidal system. The dielectric permeability of crude oil is about 20 times smaller than of water. A droplet of oil has electrical capacitance 20 times smaller than water droplet of the same size. At the comparable surface charge values oil droplets have essentially higher electrical potentials (their absolute values) in respect to water droplets. As the dielectric breakdown of wet air accurse at about 20 kV/cm, and with the estimate of the electric potential difference between oil and water droplets as 1 V, the local dielectric breakdown is expected at the distance between oil and water droplets of 0.5 microns, which coincide with the expected droplets size. This size of droplets in a strong turbulent flow of air is predicted by the Levich correction of the Kolmogorov theory for emulsification of one liquid in the turbulent flow of another. Levich extended Kolmogorov results for dispersion of incompressible liquid in the turbulent flow of compressible gas ( Ref.1).

In the abundance of air the colloidal size oil droplet is likely to be burnt. It is the matter of probability that several oil droplets can be burnt simultaneously, forming the nuclei for ignition of cloud.

There should be also mentioned that total volume of the cloud is electrically neutral, so the ions residing in air compensate the surface charges of liquid droplets. In the absence of strong turbulence the surface charge and counter ions form a diffused electric double layer, surrounding liquid droplet. At the condition of sufficiently strong turbulence, the counter ions in air may become collectivized, causing ionization of the bulk air. This effect promotes the dielectric breakdown of air at different scales, which, in turn, promotes combustion of oil, dispersed in the cloud.
Reference: V.G. Levich, "Physiochemical Hydrodynamics", Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962

GREGORY SIVASHINSKY
AN EXPERT IN COMBUSTION THEORY
THE BAUER-NEUMANN PROFESSOR OF APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND THEORETICAL MECHANICS
TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY;
CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE SPANISH ROYAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

The fire tornado envisioned in the article by Magarshak and Levich seems to be quite feasible from the point of view of fundamentals of combustion theory. The issue therefore definitely merits serious attention both
experimentally and theoretically. It is important to identify mechanisms controlling the phenomenon and to find ways for its control and mitigation.

I am aware that in the 1960-ies the explosion of man made fuel-water clouds was studied both in the Soviet Union and the USA as a possible weapon. I believe that this system is physically related to that outlined in the Magarshak-Levich article.

ALEX SHTEINBERG (BERKELEY, USA)
Dr. of Sci., Prof.
Member of Russian Natural Sciences Academy
Principal Scientist ALOFT Chemical Engineering & Materials Science
POTENTIAL DANGER OF FORMATION OF “FIRE WHIRLWIND” OVER THE GULF OF MEXICO
At analysis of combustion of certain fuel–oxidizer mixtures NECESSARY CONDITIONS (1) AND SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS (2) for this process should be considered.
1. The available data on the wind speed at various spots of a standard GW allows one to come to the following conclusion.

In a GW, the air/dispersed oil ratio is characterized by a wide range of values. So in many spots of such a GW, it would definitely be within a range of values close to a stoichiometric ratio of the components for high-temperature oxidation of the hydrocarbon. This means that the necessary condition for combustion of the fuel–oxidizer mixture is met. However it is necessary to note that the inhibiting role of water droplet should be considered separately.

2. In the case of formation a significant amount of the combustible air–dispersed oil mixture in a GW, the sufficient condition for its combustion is the presence of a combustion-initiation source. Unfortunately, such a source can be easily found in a GW interacting with the Gulf surface. According to available quite reliable experimental data, an atmospheric electric discharge (“artificial lightning”) takes place at formation of a water fountain (especially conducting sea salt water) forming during underwater explosions. So the sufficient condition could be also met.

CONCLUSION
In case of formation of a GW over a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, inflammation, combustion (even into the explosion-like mode) of a formed combustible system consisting of dispersed oil droplets suspended in air (playing a role of gaseous oxidizer) can take place.

The study of parameters determining critical conditions for inflammation of this combustible system initiated by an electric discharge (i.e. chances for such a disaster) should be urgently performed both experimentally and theoretically. Also the inhibiting role of water in this process should be analyzed.