What will happen to all that oil in the ocean?

[quinnox]

Can someone tell me because they won't be able to clean all those millions of gallons up, what will happen to it? Will it eventually dissolve in the ocean or just float around for years or spread out all over the ocean or what?

[Xipe Totec]

1. Eventually? We will eat it

Quite literally.

[cutlassmama]

2. Supposedly 30-40% is supposed to "evaporate"

[izquierdista]

5. And it will

The light fraction, the part that gets distilled into gasoline will partition off into the atmosphere. Thirty to forty percent is a bit of a highside guess, since it's not being cracked like at the refinery. The rest, the heavier fraction is still less dense than sea water, so given enough time, it will make its way to the surface and float around until it washes up somewhere. While it is floating, it will get solarized, which will break it into smaller molecules and is part of the degredation process. Microbial action will consume more of it, but that time scale could be on the order of years.

It really depends on the particle size of the oil droplets. The technical reason to add detergents and try to break it up is so that there will be small droplets with lots of surface area for the microbes to attack. Once it washes up, the amount of weathering and microbial action will pick up and the land will be the final remediation place for most of the oil.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. The bulk of it will have to be picked up.

That which doesn't eventually breaks down. That's the idea behind dispersants, spread it out and it will break down faster.

[Cleita]

4. It will stay there sloshing around.

They need to start vacuuming it up into tankers. They don't want to I believe because they will have to get it to refineries, which means into the market pretty soon and the price will come way down. They don't want that. Our Arab masters (OPEC) don't want that either. It's something that will have to be done though. Obama is going to have a tough decision to make and will go through some tough times. I hope he decides to do the ethical thing and not the political thing.

[Statistical]

6. Bacteria.

Lots of bacteria in warm waters have evolved to eat the billions of gallons that have seeped into oceans naturally over the last couple millenniums.

[customerserviceguy]

7. I've wondered lately

Would it be "finders, keepers"? If someone could skim it off the surface, and produce something useful out of it, without having the expenses of extraction (besides the skimming and purifying, of course) wouldn't that encourage some small private firms to start salvaging it, if it were economically feasible?

Or would the government make the finder pay BP for "their" oil?