National

Busy Hurricane Season Spells Trouble For Oil In Gulf

By Jon Hamilton

Published May 27, 2010 at 12:40 PM PDT

This story was published more than 14 years ago.

Second, water temperatures in parts of the Atlantic are up to four degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average, which would help hurricanes become more powerful.

And third, the Atlantic remains in a period of high hurricane activity that began in the mid 1990s.

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The combination of hurricane-force winds and oil would be especially in parts of the Gulf where the huge areas of land are only a few feet above high tide, says Nan Walker, an oceanographer at the School of the Coast and Environment at Louisiana State University.

"The bottom quarter of Louisiana is very low-lying," she says. "So the oil potentially will go quite far inland," Walker says.

What happens with both oil and hurricanes in the next few months will depend partly on something called the loop current, a warm current that flows into the Gulf near Cancun and out again near the Florida Keys.

"Most hurricanes that enter the Gulf of Mexico virtually explode, they intensify over the loop current because of the amazing amount of heat that it has," Walker says.

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But this year the loop current may also move oil around the gulf.

One tendril of the slick has already entered an eddy of the loop current that seems to be spinning away from the main flow.

If the eddy breaks away entirely, it will carry oil toward the coasts of Texas or Mexico, Walker says. If it rejoins the loop current, the oil will head toward the Florida Straights.

And then there's the possibility that a hurricane in the Gulf could actually cause another oil spill.

There are about 3,800 oil and gas platforms in the Gulf, says Jill Hasling, president of Weather Research Center in Houston, which helps oil companies prepare for hurricanes. So it's almost impossible for a hurricane to cross the gulf without hitting one.

People got a reminder of that when Hurricane Ike swept through the Gulf two years ago, Hasling says.

"Over 2,100 of those platforms were exposed to hurricane conditions and out of that 60 were totally destroyed," she says

That didn't cause any major oil spills. But every time a rig goes down, scientists say, it tests the emergency systems that are supposed shut off wells before large quantities of oil enter the Gulf.