Remember your first underwater camera? How cool it was to take pictures below the surface of the ocean on holiday? The images weren’t the clearest, but it was revealing to share what could only earlier be seen underwater.
Imagine what we’ll see when high def images are released from the BP oil spill? No holiday shots here. The spill is now considered the worst in American history, with speculation of approx. 4,000 barrels of oil a day trapped between the ocean floor and the surface, and leaking approx. 15,000 barrels of oil a day.
I’m drawn to learning about how this crisis is being dealt with from a leadership perspective and from an interdisciplinary approach. Call for more images and recommendations to help address the spill are now coming from those not in the oil industry, but from those experts who live and breathe underwater. While the arrival of Titanic and Avatar celebrity director James Cameron offering assistance was initially met with some skepticism, we’ve quickly learned that he is a passionate underwater expert with more than 20 years experience, over 50 major dives and owns submersibles and ocean-ready robots.
Dr. Joseph MacInnis under water
Cameron was joined recently by Canadian deep-sea expert Dr. Joseph MacInnis in Washington, where more than 25 scientists, and government and private-sector experts discussed potential solutions and recommendations for the spill. CTV’s Seamus O’Regan interviews MacInnis on the meeting here.
Since the oil spill late April, only BP camera’s have been providing images to the world. They have been low quality and primarily just at the surface. Experts like Joe MacInnis are encouraging the need for 3rd party images – in high definition, 3D camera’s where possible – and an independent group to provide insight.
Finally, just this week, BP released underwater images of the gushing oil and estimates of the damage continue to increase with this new information.
MacInnis, a passionate undersea explorer, leadership expert and environmentalist noted in a recent interview: “I am devastated, angry and frustrated…suddenly the Gulf of Mexico, the ninth-largest body of water in the world, takes this colossal hit. It’s [now] a biological black hole.”
MacInnis is focused on the damage below the surface: ‘IMAGINE A SUBMERGED PLUME OF OIL four times as high as the Empire State Building. It begins at the seafloor, thundering out of a shattered twenty-inch pipe with so much force that the sediments seem to sway….At this depth, fifteen hundred meters below the surface, there is no light so the oil is unseen-a murderous black presence within an everlasting darkness. As it rises, it swells into thunderheads, roiling clouds, and ragged columns. Everybody has been talking about what is going on at the surface, but there is a mile between the seabed and the surface. What is happening there?… It is the killing fields. For sharks, whales, and thousands of other species they’re a place of incalculable carnage.’
How often do we get caught up only in what is on the surface – of a person, a book or an issue at hand – and neglect what is going on behind the scenes and beneath the surface? It’s a high definition, transparent world we now live in. What’s below doesn’t stay there very long before being discovered…
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More from Dr. Joseph MacInnis:
Article in the Globe & Mail – Damage from spill turning Gulf into ‘biological black hole’
Article in Sea Shepherd – The Gulf of Mexico Killing Fields BP Doesn’t Want You Thinking About
Article in Vanity Fair – James Cameron’s Oil-Spill Brainstorming Session: “It Was Time to Sound the Horn”
Posted by globalspeakersagency 
