The world of news reporting is fickle. You get a new crisis and the old one goes away. With the well in the Gulf of Mexico capped, news moves on to other things.  The stories of reporters flying in like locusts and leaving are the subject of many movies. However, normally someone is left behind to see the big picture. 

According to the Federal Government, about half of the oil spilled is unaccounted for. While reports have stated that bacteria dispersed it the reality is the long term impact is the real question.

However, the big picture is often about the impact of even small things as we have learned in Chaos Theory (e.g the butterfly effect). And the long term effects are often not counted. 

For M2M technologies, we can have a goal of predictive information, based on history. 

However, obtaining information is often dependent on putting sensors in remote places.

Dana Wetzel, a marine chemist at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota Florida has been testifying before congress about the BP oil spill. She has a virtual shellfish that “is a passive, semi-permeable membrane device that attracts contaminants from the water for four weeks.” The device "will actually simulate what an organism like a fish or an oyster will be seeing as it lives in its environment."

According to her interview on NPR:

"It's a possibility we could detect dispersants, but if you think about the amount of oil that was spilled in the environment versus the amount of dispersants that were used, the overwhelming signal you're going to get from an accumulation study or any sort of contaminant study is likely to be the spilled oil and not the dispersant," Wetzel says.

The goal of using these collectors is to get a sense of what the impact on marine life will be like with all these new contributors to their ecosystem.   Will the shellfish die and if they don’t die will they be safe to eat is a real question we have to ask.

As Wetzel testified to Congress, "We could count dead bodies — and that certainly is useful — but it doesn't tell us what's going to happen to the reproductive fitness of this organism, Whether it's a clam, a tuna or a dolphin — is the exposure to this oil at that level going to affect whether or not that animal can reproduce? Or will it affect whether or not its offspring can reproduce? That's something we really don't know."

BP put almost 2 million gallons of dispersants into the Gulf, and just because the water is blue again, does not mean it smooth sailing.

Here initial study is putting the virtual shellfish out for four weeks. I would love to see her have access to M2M technologies that would allow her to have some deep longer term sensors.

Oil and Gas are one of our key M2M vertical markets. Maybe they have some solutions that they can share to pay it forward.