Of course it isn’t all gone, like BP and our government have said. You didn’t believe, and neither did I, that several months’ worth of gooey BP oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico just disappeared — miraculously vanished — a day or two after the well was capped.

Sure enough, scientists are saying that in addition to to a miles-long plume of subsurface oil (seemingly invisible to BP and government officials), they have found a two-inch thick layer of oil on the ocean floor. Lots of it. Freshly deposited. In the vicinity of the BP well. And it seems they think much of it is there because the heavy use of dispersants broke it into particles too small to float. Gee, I’ll bet BP never counted on that happening …

It’s in the financial best interests of a lot of folks that huge amounts of that infamous oil not be found. Fortunately for the rest of us, scientists aboard the research vessel Oceanus are not among them.

For more on the scientists’ findings, see MSNBC’s story.