BP oil spill
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Submersible robots made another risky attempt to control the underwater Gulf oil gusher on Wednesday.
After six weeks of failures to block the well or divert the oil, the latest mission involved using a set of tools akin to an oversized deli slicer and garden shears to break away the broken riser pipe so engineers can then position a cap over the well's opening.
But it's a big gamble: Even if it succeeds, it will temporarily increase the flow of an already massive leak by 20 percent - at least 100,000 gallons more a day. That's on top of the estimated 500,000 to 1 million gallons gushing out already.
If BP's new effort to contain the leak fails, the procedure will have made the biggest oil spill in U.S. history even worse.
"It is an engineer's nightmare," said Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University professor of environmental sciences. "They're trying to fit a 21-inch cap over a 20-inch pipe a mile away. That's just horrendously hard to do. It's not like you and I standing on the ground pushing - they're using little robots to do this."