“Mommy, why’d you let the mean oil men pollute the shit out of all the water in the world?” One of the times I’m thankful I never had children.

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”

Click to enlarge, via.

Click to enlarge, via.

Nothing could go wrong here.

Former Bush and Clinton FEMA officials plan to press the Department of Homeland Security

to stress the need for a public education campaign about the Mayan calendar’s prediction of the apocalypse in 2012. No, not that they believe the world will end during President Obama‘s re-election year bid, but they see it as the perfect hook for a campaign about disaster preparedness. Don’t laugh. Vera Chan, a Web trend analyst at Yahoo, says searches for “end times,” “2012,” and “apocalypse” surge any time disasters occur.

Far be it for me to advocate violence, but somehow I think the Westboro idjits might have a few problems if they follow up on this…

MONTCOAL W.V. — Protesters from Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., headed to the Upper Big Branch mine Thursday morning to convey the message that the explosion there that left 25 miners dead was a result of e-mail messages allegedly sent from West Virginia threatening the Church and its publisher, according to a statement from the Church.

The church, which is led by Fred Phelps, has attracted attention in recent years by showing up at funerals for soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. At those funerals they carry signs that say that God hates homosexuality and that the death of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is God’s way of punishing the United States for its tolerance of it.

(snip)

The statement said the church had received threats about a trip to West Virginia and Virginia scheduled to begin Thursday.

“So God reached down and smacked one of those mines, killing 25 (and likely four more are dead),” it said. “Now you moan and wallow in self-pity, and pour over the details of the dead rebels’ lives, pretending they’re heroes.”

Wow, just freaking wow. Via Think Progress.

Alot of this crap happening lately.