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Chances remain slim to none that oil or the now-familiar “tar balls” from the Deepwater Horizon disaster  that killed 11 workers in the Gulf of Mexico will reach the North Carolina coast this summer, experts say.

But it is in the blue water offshore — the same depths where the BP well continued to gush oil a mile below the ocean’s surface last week — that  damage to Tar Heel marine life may lurk.

Although sport fishermen are having a strong season off the North Carolina coast this year, scientists fear the oil spill  and cleanup could have a lasting impact on bluefin tuna, marlin and swordfish that spawn in the south and migrate north.

“This stands to affect us directly in terms of the shared ecosystem of these marine animals,” said  Doug Rader, chief ocean scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. “We are all very much connected.”

Getting a first-hand look at the spill, the jointly operated  Duke University/UNC-Chapel Hill research vessel Cape Hatteras rounded the  Dry Tortugas and entered the Gulf late last week. Its webcam showed a jumping dolphin and no sign  of an oil slick, a reminder of the vastness of the Gulf itself. But by Thursday, the crew began photographing rust-colored globs, transmitted on its  blog.

The ship’s mission, after retrieving equipment at Gulfport, Miss., will be to measure the role of the greenhouse gas methane in the spreading spill and to track the suspended rivers of oil being described as mid-depth “plumes.”

At Duke, an oceanographer who is an authority on sea currents and circulation said the west coast of Florida and the Keys would be the most likely to suffer the next damage from the disaster.

But any residual oil pulled north along the seaboard on the so-called “Loop Current,” oceanographer  Susan Lozier observed, would be both diluted and pushed outward toward the ocean.

“We have a very, very small possibility that we will ever see oil (from the Gulf) on our beaches in North Carolina,” Lozier said.

“That said, the big unknown right now is how much oil has been spilled. That really hampers our efforts to know the fate of the oil.”

The fact that the source of the oil is at the ocean floor made the usual surface cleanup plan somewhat obsolete, in Rader’s view.

“We’ve never faced a disaster of this scale originating at the bottom (of the sea),” he said. “The whole mindset, the theory of chemical dispersants, was diametrically opposed.”

Among the questions scientists have raised about dispersants — potentially adding  1 million gallons of additional toxicity to the estimated  50 to 100 million gallons of oil already loosed on the Gulf:

* Do the detergents simply break the large globules into smaller globules — what some fear is an “out of sight, out of mind” effect?

* Given the depth of the spill, will this create a “toxic soup” that rains down through the water column, re-exposing plankton — fish, shrimp and crab larvae — and eating away at the  Viosca Knoll  reef ?

As cleanup crews struggle to contain the spill, now in its eighth week, a key concern is that it be brought under control before the height of the hurricane season, which is expected to be unusually active. If that does not occur, experts agree, all bets are off.

“Right now, a hurricane would be devastating,” said Duke’s Lozier. “It would bring a lot of those surface waters, the booms, onshore. It would be bad news.”

The wild card of the  hurricane season was downplayed in a yearlong offshore drilling report that was concluded — ironically — a week  before the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe April 20.

Rader, who co-chaired the panel, said last week that the energy industry’s assurances about safeguards and inspections in that report have turned out to be false.

At the  Point off Hatteras, where Mobil unsuccessfully sought to drill in the 1980s,  the prevailing currents and the prevailing wisdom are that any spill would be pulled out to sea.

But that does not apply to the scenario of a hurricane, or even a classic “nor’easter,” that has regularly lashed the Outer Banks and flooded  N.C. 12.

The current dimensions of the Gulf spill, if transposed on the Carolinas coastline, would extend from  Myrtle Beach to Corolla, north of Nags Head, Rader estimates.

“Should an event of that same scale happen here, we would wipe out tourism, recreational fishing, fisheries, a whole way of life,” Rader said.
“That’s our golden goose. We would kill it with oil.”

But for  Dale Murphy, who draws his livelihood from those very riches, the choice is unclear, and he considers nature more forgiving.

 Murphy, the captain who piloted the research vessel Cape Hatteras into the Gulf this weekend, had navigated the ship through the Gulf in April and just sailed past the Deepwater Horizon before it exploded . He is a professional fisherman and self-described  “hoi-toider” who speaks in the Core Banks dialect of his native Davis.

On the N.C. coast and the Gulf, he sees competing interests — evident last week when the White House softened an offshore drilling moratorium in the face of pressure from Gulf state residents clamoring to go back to work.

“What are you going to do? Do without oil? Park your car in the garage and never take it out again? Stop going to the hospital where everything is made of plastic and petroleum products?” Murphy asked.

“People need to slow down and take a deep breath. We’ve got to learn from this, and let the scientists do their job.”

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or  lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com