Scientists find vast unreported oil leak from Deepwater Horizon - Times Online

Scientists find vast unreported oil leak from Deepwater Horizon - Times Online: "A plume of oil 10 miles (16km) long, three miles wide and 300ft thick is pouring into the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

The plume is one of a number that scientists have found gushing into the sea a mile underwater, increasing concerns that the size of the spill could be thousands of times larger than has been previously calculated, according to The New York Times.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, from the University of Georgia, who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather information from the spill. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column,” Dr Joye told the newspaper."