"There's a chemical dispersant/oil mixture that is now ... over vast areas of the Gulf and as we feared it's not concentrated at the surface," Philippe Cousteau Jr. told CNN, adding "this absolutely is a nightmare."

"We were about 15 to 20 feet down and it was dispersed into smaller and smaller particles throughout the water column in these billowing clouds that were just circling us, encompassing us in this toxic soup. It was very, very alarming."

Oil has been spewing into the seas since an April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, just off the Louisiana coast, and the spreading slick is seeping into fragile marshlands.

"I know that my father and grandfather would have been doing this if they were alive and that they would have been just as horrified by what they saw as I was," Cousteau said in an entry on his blog, www.earthecho.org/blog.

During the "grueling" dive which took three weeks to prepare, Cousteau and his team wore full hazmat diving suits and heavy hard hat helmets weighing some 15 kilos (30 pounds).

He said as the team was down there "wave after wave of oil/chemical dispersant mix washed over us."

"This was one of the most terrible experiences of my life seeing first hand what this oil spill looks like under the water and knowing that this contamination is spreading over hundreds of miles."

And as BP on Wednesday readied a new bid to cap the leak, Cousteau warned: "Even if they do manage to cut off the oil tomorrow, the oil that has escaped will spread, following currents as far as the Arctic Circle via the Gulf Stream.

"I can only hope that we learn from this and start to truly take the kind of drastic action necessary to begin the decades long road to recovery."

Agence France-Presse

(China Daily 05/28/2010 page10)