The Murder of the Gulf and the Death of the World

1. A Knife in the Planet's Jugular

The blood of the Earth is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, one of the world's largest deposits draining as fast as it can through one of the biggest holes we're capable of drilling. This is like the Titanic of oil 'spills', much worse than the Exxon Valdez because at least a supertanker only spills once. This wound is pumping out a supertanker every four days or so and it just keeps coming. It's a fair bet that with the amount that's already spewed out, the Gulf of Mexico is already dead. The Caribbean might not be such a hot vacation spot this year, either. I've heard some people speculate that this might completely wreck every ocean on the planet, and given the state they're in - what with the islands of plastic in both the Pacific and Atlantic, the blooming dead zones, the decimation of fish stocks due to overfishing, fertilizer runoff, and heavy metal toxicity - given all that, who knows? Maybe they're right, and this one event will be enough to push the oceans over the edge and if the oceans go down so does everything else. It'll be the end of the Permian or the end of the Cretaceous all over again, and maybe the biosphere will bounce back but it could take a few tens of millions of years and if anything 'intelligent' manages to evolve again it will have no idea we ever existed ... the thin layer of the Anthropocene will have been erased by the compression of geologic time, and all that will be apparent to the avian scientists of the future will be that the mammalian age came to an abrupt end for reasons no doubt controversial.

Hyperlinked and be-pictured at Moon Food.