There's a lot going on in the Gulf of Mexico right now with BP's big oil spill. The whole thing, from any perspective, is no less than an ecological disaster. This spill will have far reaching and long lasting effects for a long time to come.

Nobody can predict how the oil spill will turn out in the end, there are too many variables, too many unknowns and there's no similar historical data to compare the spill to. We can however, make educated decisions on whether some effects of the 'cleanup effort' may actually be compounding the problem.

As human beings we tend to let our senses drive our reactions to situations like the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. One of our most powerful senses is our sense of sight. BP's cleanup efforts are firmly focussed on reducing the visual impact of the oil spill by doing everything they can to not to allow it to reach the shore.

BP is trying to clean up and break up the oil before it reaches the shore by using a chemical on the oil spill called a dispersant. An oil dispersant is exactly what the name implies, it's a dispersant and it does nothing to get rid of or clean up the actual oil.

Oil dispersants are designed to disperse the oil through the water column so that the oil isn't gathered on the surface of the water. But just because you can't see it on the surface - doesn't mean that the oil isn't there. The dispersants broke the oil up into smaller bits and helped those bits fall under the surface of the water. When we don't see the oil on the surface of the water it appeals to our visual sense and helps us believe that everything is going good with the cleanup effort.

BP is currently applying dispersant at the water surface using planes that spray the dispersant like a crop-duster would spray a farmers field. Over 156,000 gallons (almost 600,000 liters) have already been applied at the water surface. BP also wants to apply a dispersant directly into the oil stream at the bottom of the ocean. BP hopes that by applying the dispersants at the source of the leak that it will mix with the oil better.

It's going to be a lot easier for BP's public relations team to make everybody feel better about their disaster when there aren't a lot of stories on the news about birds being cleaned up after they've been soaked in oil. It's going to be a lot easier for BP if there's very little visual impact of the spill along the shoreline of the gulf.

There might not be many oil soaked birds or oil slicks on the beaches, but the trade-off for not seeing the visual impact of the spill is actually just pushing the effects of the spill lower into the food chain. Rather than effecting the larger creatures like birds or turtles, using the dispersants means that the oil is going to effect the smaller creatures that the larger creatures normally feed upon.

Not only has BP pushed the effects of the oil spill lower into the food chain, but they've probably also compounded the problem by adding huge quantities of other chemicals into the already toxic mix.

Since there's not enough information on oil spills of this nature it's hard for anybody to say whether the cleanup effort is going to work. It's also hard for anybody to make any kind of decision about the methods being used to try and clean it up. The only thing that anybody can say for sure is that this should have never happened in the first place and that it should never be allowed to happen again.