With New Jersey sea shore towns preparing for the multibillion dollar summer season, scientists say the chance that tar balls will wash up in the next couple of months is very remote.
"Whatever is floating in the surface has to come ashore across about 400 miles of northeast Atlantic Ocean," Stewart Farrell, director of the Coastal Research Center at Richard Stockton College said.
Rutgers University has sent a submersible robot glider to the gulf, another will follow. Like a weather balloon taking atmospheric measurements, the glider measures water currents sending information back to Rutgers every three hours.
A map shows the movement of the current that loops around Florida and becomes the slow meandering Gulf Stream making its way across the Atlantic to Europe. Will it carry oil? Probably. Will that oil make it to New Jersey beaches? Probably not.
"You won't see anything until it gets into the Gulf Stream and that's down in Florida, and it's about the same speed of movement as if you were to start at Key West and start walking to New Jersey," Farrell said.
Still those who love the beach are concerned about any environmental consequences from the spill.
"If we couldn't come to the beach anymore, I don't know what we would do," Bill Curcio of Galloway, New Jersey said.
Scientists in New Jersey believe it is unlikely that any oil will make its way to the Delaware and New Jersey beaches, but because they can't say it's a zero probability, they will continue to track it.
