Matt Simmons, who described BP’s operation to cap its leaking Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico as the “biggest environmental cover-up ever”, is not the only one circulating alarming ideas about the spill.
The drama of the Deepwater Horizon disaster has captivated many, and the mix of methane gas in the oil leak has made perfect fodder for doomsday theories and rumours. Some of these have turned out to be true, such as the contention that the actual size of the leak was much greater than BP and the US authorities were at first admitting. Others, we can now safely say, were simply implausible. Most of them involved methane gas and extinction in the same sentence.
Here’s a sample of the most far-fetched ones:
