BP and US government fuzzy about the size of the massive spill they can't fix

Oxygen levels in some areas have dropped 30 percent, and should continue to drop, Joye said.

"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."

SHOOT: Couldn't one just fire a torpedo filled with superglue into the nose of that pipe?

clipped from www.huffingtonpost.com ROBERT, La. -- Oil from a blown-out well is forming huge underwater plumes below a visible slick in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists said as BP wrestled for a third day Sunday with its latest contraption for slowing the nearly month-old gusher. One of the plumes is "as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots," the New York Times reported. "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." BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well. "The answer is no to that," a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. "We're not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It's not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort."