In the first days after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, I was more confused than most people because, rather than just being ignorant, I was learning and parroting unintentional misinformation. I recall telling my parents—whom generally have reason to trust me—that “What’s upsetting is that BP can stop this spill, but they just don’t want to ruin the oil field for future drilling. Russia has successfully stopped deep sea oil leaks by nuking them.” What was insidious about my statement is that while part of it is novel and true—Russia has stopped some deepwater oil leaks using controlled nuclear explosions—the overall message is more sensationalism than fact. In reality, setting off a large explosion on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico carries unpalatable risk (based, in large part, on the unique hydrate-sediment composition of this section of the ocean floor). That said, there was a disconnect between what the media was reporting and what I wanted to know. When I couldn’t find facts, I apparently ate up the conspiracy theories. Thankfully, someone finally directed me towards a resource that was both informative and accurate.

Cartoon by Rossana Henriques

That resource is www.theoildrum.com. I like The Oil Drum (TOD) because it both fills the information void about the spill and because it’s a great model of what scientific outreach can be. The Oil Drum is a blog populated by engineers, geologists, and other specialists within the oil industry. While much of the blog is devoted to determining whether there will be an oil shortage crisis in the future (the consensus is there will be), and how to deal with it (the consensus is that it is possible), the catastrophe at the Deepwater Horizon sent the blog’s regular contributors on a mission to evaluate what was going on and to inform the public.

The Oil Drum serves the important functions of listening to its laymen readers and then answering questions, dispelling myths, and analyzing media reports. While BP CEO Tony Hayward was announcing that the top kill method had a 60 to 70% chance of working, the bloggers at TOD were explaining the physics of why this was a vast overstatement. As of writing this, there are threads stating the statistics behind how many relief wells should be drilled to ensure that one will work, a thread explaining the effects of erosion on the oil flow rate, a thread debating the worst case scenario that the casing of the well may be compromised, and a discussion about what can go wrong after the relief wells are drilled. In the background, there remain the discussions about the problem of our rate of oil consumption and how we can wean ourselves off of oil.

The Oil Drum has become a well-functioning community. A small nucleus of people tend to be the most trustworthy, and they both start topics for discussion and moderate the forums to keep the signal to noise at a high level. What’s admirable is that they’re confident enough to write detailed answers on a broad range of questions, and the site is strong enough that other users can tactfully point out errors in thinking and offer corrections. Due to the oil leak, there’s now a constant influx of people with relatively simple questions, which has the excellent effect of making the community flesh out their answers and explanations. In short, its an important resource for the modern age, in part made possible by reaching a threshold number of professional and layman participation.

In part, it’s the satisfaction of reading TOD that has led me towards reading the science blogs that RU students and faculty are involved in¹. While the scopes of these blogs are substantially different from TOD, they’re doing the critical job of fostering people’s interest in science and laying the groundwork for more participation. What everyone there conveys is their interest in science, and it’s infective. From Joe Luna’s descriptions of the trials and tribulations of historical scientists to Jeanne Garbarino’s personal stories of how science impacts family life, the bloggers at the Incubator are planting the seed for a community that discusses science and its impacts. While biomedical science has not, and hopefully never will, had a disaster anywhere near the scope of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, there certainly are factual gaps between what we know and what the public knows about important issues. The Oil Drum is currently filling an informational void about modern energy; the current crop of science blogs can fill informational voids about modern science.

Reference:
¹ The Rockefeller blog is at: incubator.rockefeller.edu