"Oil, the Loop Current and the Atlantic"

"Many have fretted that oil from the spill in the Gulf of Mexico could spread to the Florida Keys and then northward up the Atlantic. Now, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. has come up with some computer modeling suggesting  that the spill could extend along thousands of miles up the Atlantic coast as early as this summer.

The researchers at the center, a national lab sponsored by the National Science Foundation, stressed that their study was not a forecast and had not undergone scientific peer review. But they said their computer simulations offered a likely pathway for the dispersal of the oil if it entered the gulf’s so-called loop current, which circulates the waters in a clockwise pattern."

Mireya Navarro reports for the Green blog in the New York Times June 3, 2010.