Thursday, May 13, 2010

Mixing Colors - an Artist's Perspective

We have a huge amount of black crude spilling into the gulf daily. All day and night long. An ecological disaster of epic proportions. This crude will be washing up on shores all around the gulf. That’s the visible damage. The part we can’t see, the slow creep of death in the gulf waters will take years to play itself out. But I have a question for greater minds than my own.

We’ve seen over the last year or so the scientist’s explanation of how melting ice at our poles, the exposure of dark dirt and rock, will feed on itself and speed up the process. That the melting process will accelerate as more dark color is added to the pristine and constant white color of the poles (and Greenland and Iceland). If we consider the gulf is a rather large closed habitat (slip in and out between Florida, Cuba, and Mexico), that what you dump in there will take a long time to escape (which from an ecological POV is good… a better chance at containment), then what does adding that much black do to the heat absorption qualities of the seawater in the gulf? I have to assume it will raise the gulf water temperature by a degree or three. And if we do that what happens to hurricane season this year? How many class 5’ers do we get?

Am I the only one that sees what mixing that much black with clear ocean green will do in the long run? My thinking is that the heat absorption qualities of the gulf sea water will go up dramatically. Forget about the marine life ingesting the oil. Some marine life is very sensitive to temperature deviation. A few degrees more or less and they die. Simple as that. And you add a billion gallons (which will be surpassed before this is even plugged) of black pigment to the paint bucket the gulf is and the temperature is going to change dramatically. Or so I think. What aren’t the experts considering… or what aren’t they telling us?

But here’s the real question. I saw an article the other day that says we are at the threshold of the tipping point for dramatic climatic change. …threshold of the tipping point. Standing on the edge looking into the abyss. What happens to that conveyer belt of cold and warm water that runs in the Atlantic moving water up to the pole then back down past the gulf that is responsible for maintaining global weather patterns if we drastically change the balance of water temperature in the gulf?

Did BP and Halliburton just push us over the edge into the next global ice age?

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