According to today's Philadelphia Inquirer, the culprit responsible for the recent Delaware River oil spill has been identified as a large (3-4 feet wide and 15 feet long) submerged pipe, possibly a sewer pipe. The Army Corps of Engineers seems to have missed it during inspections last summer, and if that turns out to be the case, they'd be liable.

A rusty pipe did it.

The Coast Guard said yesterday that a cast-iron pipe sticking up from the bottom of the Delaware River lanced the steel hull of the Athos I just as the Greek oil tanker prepared to dock, causing one of the worst oil spills - if not the worst - in the river's history.

Investigators said they had found the U-shaped pipe jutting 3 feet from the river bottom about 700 feet from a marine terminal owned by Citgo Petroleum Corp. in West Deptford.

But as one question was answered 12 days after the environmental disaster unfolded, others emerged in an investigation that is expected to last months.

What are the origins of the pipe, and how did it end up in the river? If it was there long enough to corrode, how did other ships pass over it unharmed? And how did it avoid detection in June when the Army Corps of Engineers did a routine sonar scan of the riverbed?

Liability is complicated by strict liability statutes passed by Congress after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, however:

Under a federal law passed in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez disaster that had fouled Alaska the previous year, tankers that carry oil and their insurers are responsible for damage, whether or not they caused it, said Brian O'Neill of Minneapolis, lead lawyer for groups suing Exxon Mobil Corp. in the Valdez legal fight, which has dragged on for 15 years.

But provisions of the law make it likely that much of the Athos cost may ultimately be paid by a U.S. fund financed by a surcharge on every barrel of imported oil.

Strict liability, of course, is just the legal picture. To the extent that there's actual, specific responsibility, the lion's share of the blame would appear to be with the U.S. Army. Whether this is fair or not depends on how broad and how general a view one wishes to take of these things.

Considering that environmentalism appears to be a man-made morality doctrine, it might be fair to examine the big picture of oil spills generally. I think we are somewhat programmed and conditioned to see oil as "unnatural" and hence, profoundly immoral.

What might the laws of nature and of nature's god have to say in this regard? What is crude oil?

Geologists generally agree that crude oil was formed over millions of years from the remains of tiny aquatic plants and animals that lived in ancient seas. There may be bits of brontosaurus thrown in for good measure, but petroleum owes its existence largely to one-celled marine organisms. As these organisms died, they sank to the sea bed. Usually buried with sand and mud, they formed an organic-rich layer that eventually turned to sedimentary rock. The process repeated itself, one layer covering another.

Then, over millions of years, the seas withdrew. In lakes and inland seas, a similar process took place with deposits formed of non-marine vegetation.

In some cases, the deposits that formed sedimentary rock didn't contain enough oxygen to completely decompose the organic material. Bacteria broke down the trapped and preserved residue, molecule by molecule, into substances rich in hydrogen and carbon. Increased pressure and heat from the weight of the layers above then caused a partial distillation of the organic remnants, transforming them, ever so slowly, into crude oil and natural gas.

Although various types of hydrocarbons - molecules made of hydrogen and carbon atoms - form the basis of all petroleum, they differ in their configurations. The carbon atoms may be linked in a ring or a chain, each with a full or partial complement of hydrogen atoms. Some hydrocarbons combine easily with other materials, and some resist such bonding.

The number of carbon atoms determines the oil's relative "weight" or density. Gases generally have one to four carbon atoms, while heavy oils and waxes may have 50, and asphalts, hundreds.

Whether it is "unnatural" to have something otherwise natural in an inappropriate place at the wrong time is another matter. That's where moralists like environmentalists and religious leaders enter the picture.

How very odd that crude oil was itself the original "snake oil":

There were few takers of the 19th century elixir that came to be called "snake oil." It was one of the less successful uses of petroleum, but not the first to claim healing properties. Ancient Persians, 10th century Sumatrans and pre-Columbian Indians all believed that crude oil had medicinal benefits. Marco Polo found it used in the Caspian Sea region to treat camels for mange, and the first oil exported from Venezuela (in 1539) was intended as a gout treatment for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

The mysterious oil that sometimes seeped to the earth's surface had other uses as well. In Mesopotamia around 4000 B.C., bitumen - a tarry crude - was used as caulking for ships, a setting for jewels and mosaics, and an adhesive to secure weapon handles. Egyptians used it for embalming, and the walls of Babylon and the famed pyramids were held together with it. The Roman orator Cicero carried a crude-oil lamp. And, in North America, the Senecas and Iroquois used crude oil for body paint and for ceremonial fires.

Back to nature. I was shocked to discover that like many activities subject to conventional moralistic judgments, oil spills themselves occur in (GASP!) nature! The following chart comes not from another amoral petroleum-based web site, but from the vaunted Smithsonian Institute (the numbers represent "how many millions of gallons of oil each source puts into the oceans worldwide each year"):

Gee.... 62 million gallons worth of oil spills occur in nature? (This is even worse than the Kinsey Report, folks....) For those wishing to see nature in action, here's a satellite photograph of a large oil spill (can a spill be a called a "seep"?) triggered by the the eruption of the Lewotobi laki-laki, just off Flores Island. (A place where "hobbit men" went extinct for reasons unknown.)

Well, just because something occurs in nature, that doesn't mean it's natural! As pointed out in a previous post (and as a Eugene Volokh reader made clear):

what nature does is no guide for how humans should act!

Perhaps the Smithsonian should burn that heretical chart!

UPDATE: The Smithsonian can go ahead and burn their chart; the National Research Council has one that's even worse:

AND MORE: I left some interesting links on the possible renewable nature of petroleum in the comments below. Are the Russians and Ukrainians right? (If so, is there a possibility that American science is, um, tainted?)