This was a banner day. A red letter day. One of the best days in my science career ever. Yes, even better than the day we first discovered the plumes, if you can believe that. Why? Let me start at the beginning. A few days ago, I mentioned the camera system that we have along and what it’s all about and how it works. But I didn’t elaborate on why we brought it, so now’s the time to do that.

When we first encountered the oil slick on the Pelican almost a month ago, we (Arne and I) were struck by how similar the oil under the surface looked to marine snow aggregates. We both agreed that we needed to bring the snow camera out here to get some profiles to see if the aggregates are settling all the way to the bottom and whether a mechanism like this could result in oil being removed from the surface. Okay, fine; that was about surface oil.

A week later, we found the deep plumes using the CDOM fluorometer and, while that was exciting enough, we wondered if these deep (1300m or so) layers also had aggregates in them. I sent some pictures to Alice Alldredge, the long recognized queen of marine aggregate science, and she forwarded the email to Uta Passow who is also at UC Santa Barbara. Uta agreed that it looked like marine snow aggregates could indeed play a role in oil transport so we set out immediately to submit an NSF RAPID proposal to request funds to pursue this exciting idea.

In the meantime, Mandy Joye received NSF funding for a cruise to follow up the Pelican results and she invited me along. My first question: “May I bring my snow camera?” “Of course,” she replied so here I am at sea with this camera. AND??? Well, tonight, for the first time ever, I present to you some images of oil aggregates in a plume that is found at about 1100m near the well spill site. Yes, all of that surmising, conjecturing, wondering, looking, and thinking paid off because the images you see here show a simply incredible view of the makeup of the plume. As you can see, they’re out of focus. Why is that? Well, God has a wry sense of humor and, while He gave me the blessing of confirmation of oil aggregates in the deep plume, He elected to keep my ego in check by making all of the images out of focus. I checked and re-checked the settings on the camera and they’re all correct so it’s still a mystery why the focus is off. (Ian Walsh is taking my place here on the Walton Smith tomorrow; He’ll figure it out. He’s smart!).

Still, the images are amazing and we can learn so much from them. Note the color, the size, the orientation, the layering, well, there are so many cool things about these images that I hardly know where to start. So I won’t. I’ll let you puzzle over these images just as I am doing. Look and think to your heart’s content. And I’m not showing you all of the cool stuff. Like the near whiteout one that could be a cloud of gas hydrate crystals? Maybe? So much to study!

Oh, and the Good Morning America team (Sam Champion) came out to the ship to interview us; we should be on the show tomorrow. But the exciting thing is these pictures! Oh my! I’m still on cloud nine.

This is the last sitrep for this cruise; I’ll post other information from Ian but I’ll be on dry land for at least a while.

—Vernon

Last night was a really long one. I was on CTD duty so we did cast after cast, all on the southwest side of the spill where the signals are the strongest. But the highlight of the day (aside from my afternoon nap) was the first deployment of my camera. We started fooling around with it at about 03:00 but didn't get it on its way to the bottom until about 04:30. Part of the delay was due to moving the CDOM fluorometer over to the camera frame but mostly this was due to shallow tests. I wasn't sure where to set the focus so we tried three settings before we found the right one. Each trial required opening the housing, connecting the camera to my laptop, establishing communications, setting the focus at a guessed distance, disconnecting, programming, sealing, attaching it to the frame, lowering it into the water, waiting for it to take a few photos (10 second interval), recovering, drying, removing, opening, shutting off, removing card, examining the photos, guessing at a new setting, and then repeating the process. Complicated by the fact that it's 04:00 in the morning and I'm not as fresh as I could be.

The good news is that everything worked very well and I got hundreds of photos. The bad news? The battery in the strobe light was built (by me) in 1995 and it's a nickel cadmium (NiCd) rechargeable. These are notorious for not lasting very long so I'm pleased that it worked at all, but it appears to have died when the camera was at about 900m, just ABOVE the layer of interest that we're calling a 'plume'. Very frustrating but that's life sometimes.

Okay so you can see the picture. What in the world are you looking at? Well, keep in mind that this camera uses a collimated strobe light to define a volume of water so that I can count the objects and determine their abundance. What you're looking at is a volume of water that is about 9" across and about 3.5" deep so maybe 2 liters or so. The objects are mostly organic debris and a few zooplankton. But the larger comet-like objects are what is interesting about this photo. I don't know, for sure, what they are but they resemble normal "marine snow" aggregates with one notable exception: they're upside down! Most marine snow has a comet shape like that but the "heads" usually point down. Not these; the "heads" are on top. And they're orange. Most "snow" is white or, rarely, brown. Also, you only see these in the upper 100m or less; not a single one from there down to about 900m when, alas, my strobe quit.

Want to hear a wild conjecture at what these are and what they mean? Given that they're orange, upside down, and only found near the surface, our working hypothesis is that they're aggregates of oil as well as normal marine organic matter. The orange comes either from the oil or maybe from dispersant and they're upside down because the oil part is buoyant but the "other" parts are, well, not buoyant. So the heavy things are pulling down and the light things are pulling up and that draws it out into the streamers (comets) that you see here. Again, this is just a conjecture; we have a proposal pending with NSF to investigate this phenomenon further.

Why? Because, if the hypothesis is correct, these aggregates "could" be sinking and, if that's true, they "could" be moving toward the sediment. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? You decide; I just collect the data and try to figure out what it means.

On tonight's agenda: you guessed it: CTD's and lots of them! We just never get tired of seeing the data stream and trying to figure out what it all means. Okay, I lied; we do get tired, but it's still interesting. At about 03:00 or so, I'm hoping to try another camera lowering, and so we'll see how that goes. I'm planning to lower quickly to 900m and then slowly from there to 1,550 so that I get pictures from the part of the water column (a.k.a. the "feature of interest tentatively known as the plume") that wasn't covered last night. More later!

Life here on the Walton Smith goes on; we're in a pretty solid routine and are gathering a lot of great information. We've revisited some of the same places that we studied on the Pelican cruise and it looks like some of the signals, including the CDOM, are getting stronger. Our working hypothesis here is that the oil continues to leak out so the concentrations continue to increase and that's what we're seeing.

At one station, in particular, we saw the readings go, literally, off of the chart. Yes, we had to rescale our plots so that we could see the top of this peak so it is a very strong signal, meaning that there's a lot of "oil" down there.

Of course we don't know for sure that it's even oil at these depths. Do we? Well, we have two very good indications now:

1. Adam (a post doc) filters a lot of water for his RNA analyses and he sampled the feature I described above. The filter was brown and there were visible swirls of oil on it. Could it be something else? I suppose so, but I can't think of anything. You can see these pictures on Mandy's blog: gulfblog.uga.edu
2. The bottles that Adam uses to transfer his samples reek of oil. Not the old, weathered, greasy oil that we find on the surface at long distances from ground zero; this smells like fresh oil that we sometimes find right at ground zero. And it wasn't just a faint odor; I'm talking major stench.

Our hypothesis about the signal being due to oil is looking better and better all the time. But not everyone agrees. Just today, in fact, a BP executive is quoted as saying that "the oil is on the surface. There aren't any plumes." He went on to point out that oil floats because it has a specific gravity that is less than that of water so it HAS to float. He's right, you know. Oil does float. But not always right away. If the droplets of oil are small enough, they can stay submerged for a very long time. An analogous situation is the water droplets in a cloud. Sure, they're water and water is a lot heavier than air but those droplets stay aloft for a long time. At least until you pack some of them together into a raindrop and then they'll drop out of the sky. We think that the oil (if it is oil) in these submerged layers might behave the same way. If the droplets are small enough they will remain submerged for a very long time.

How can we test this hypothesis? We can take lots of samples of the water in the layers and see if it has oil mixed in with it. And we can lower a camera into these layers to see if we can see anything that might be oil. That's what I'll be doing in just a few minutes so, hopefully, I'll report on that tomorrow. What do I expect to see? Well, not huge globs of oil. But I might see a "cloud" of oil droplets and that will be just fine.

Two pictures are included for today's SITREP.

We arrived in port in Gulfport at about 05:00 after a very long, hot, miserable night WITHOUT AIR CONDITIONING! If you live up north, that's not such a big deal, but Mississippi in May in a small room, well, it wasn't so very pleasant and no one slept very well. The culprit? The AC uses seawater to cool the heat exchanger and there are even two of them than can but alternated but, as you might have guessed, they were both very clogged with oil and had to be dis-assembled and cleaned. That requires fresh water and we ran out last night so it just wasn't so very nice. See? I'm complaining again; I better knock it off or a glider will be doing my job before you know it.

Once in port, we opened the portholes and let in some air and that really helped a lot but it wasn't until later in the day that the AC started to catch up. It's fine now so we're smiling again.

The main reason for coming in to port was to drop off the journalist, Justin Gillis, which we did. He filed his story from the ship and it appeared on the front page of the New York Times again. We all think he did a splendid job in all regards; he's an excellent writer and it was a pleasure having him along.

The next chore for the port call was to buy some dry ice to preserve some of the samples. Lindell arrived at 07:00 to drop off some tidbits for the camera frame and for Dongjoo's Go-Flo bottles so we used our van to drop Justin at the airport and to pick up the dry ice from the Walmart in Ocean Springs. 200 pounds of it. I didn't even know Walmart sold dry ice. We cleaned them out. At the checkout line, they had to weigh each package of ice to charge us by the pound (about $1.50) so that took awhile but it was nice to get out.

On the way "home" (to the ship), NPR called to ask if I had time for an interview. I was driving but agreed to talk with them and later learned that they aired it on "All Things Considered" later in the day. It was kind of early and I hadn't slept all that well and I was driving so, if I made any sense at all, it's a miracle.

Then, just before arriving back at the ship, CBS News called to ask if they could do an interview and, after a few calls, they sent Fernando Suarez to the ship and he interviewed both myself and Mandy (see photos). I'm not sure how they had a videographer so close but they did and he arrived within a half hour of the first phone call so it was pretty good (actually suspiciously good) timing. Lindell was here for all of this so she took photos and smiled a lot. I really like her smile!

As soon as the interviews were over and the rest of the ship's company returned from their errands (about noon), we dropped the lines and departed. We're now about 4 hours from Ground Zero and are planning to circumnavigate it at a radius of 3 miles to complete about 8 stations, looking for the deep "CDOM" as always. Dennis is going to bed so I get to run the CTD again, which I don't mind at all. We are expected to get there at 1:30 so we'll see how it goes. We're starting on the northeast quadrant where the USF people found their plume so we're really curious to see what that looks like.

I'm posting some photos. These include some of the ship at the pier (note oil above the water line, my camera frame (with Dongjoo and others for scale), the rosette that we're using, and one of Lindell smiling. Okay, that's more of a smirk but it's the best I got today. It sure was nice to see her, if only for a few hours.

The first part of the day was spent doing CTD casts. Cast after cast. Only 3 of us were awake all night long so it was peaceful. To recover the CTD package, it takes one person to drive the ship and run the winch and two of us on deck to guide it over the side and into place. Very routine work and very productive. We followed the plume almost due west until the water shoaled (900m) and it disappeared. Interestingly, it was mostly missing on the other side of the shoal where the water was over 1100m again so I guess the plume isn’t just spreading out at a constant depth but is actually being carried by the currents.

Ho hum, another day at sea.

Until about 3:00 in the afternoon when something really amazing happened: The iRobot Seaglider detected the plume using its CDOM sensor! This might not seem like a big deal to some of you but, to me, it’s huge and for several reasons:

1. The data are public! Our data are restricted by lots of issues and can’t be made public for awhile so we haven’t been able to show them off and that has been really frustrating. Some of the comments made in reference to our hypotheses about these data reflected the fact that our critics had NEVER SEEN THE DATA and yet were remarkably quick and confident in their criticisms. Well, the Seaglider is available for all to see and I’m hoping that everyone with an interest and a computer will go here to take a look it:
   
   Integrative Observational Platforms Group, U. Washington
   
   
2. The data were collected autonomously! This is going to be one of the most comprehensive in terms of describing the oil spill environment and they were collected by a self-guided robot by engineers in a laboratory thousands of miles away. The glider was given instructions as to where to go, how deep to dive, and how often to sample the water and it obliged without complaint, transmitting accurate reports roughly every 5 hours. I think this is how a lot of our science will be accomplished in the future. These autonomous vehicles don’t get sick, they work day and night, they don’t get paid, and they never complain about the food or accommodations. Hmmm, kind of like grad students. Well, in most regards.

And in other news, we learned the researchers on the Weatherbird found a new plume to the northeast and a scientist from LSU found one to the northwest so maybe there is a lot of oil below the surface that we are only beginning to map. Lots and lots to do.

At this moment, we’re headed in to port to drop off the journalist, pick up another, and then head out for more sampling. We’ll be back in port on the 2nd for a similar reason and we’ll just keep on going for another week or so. The weather has been good and the food excellent so I’m not complaining. Except for the AC; I sure do with it was working. Clearly, I’m not a glider or I wouldn’t even notice so I better shut up or I’ll be replaced!

     Today on the Walton Smith was a very good day. We did lots and lots of CTDs and followed the plume at least 11 miles out, which is where we are right now. This is far enough that the CDOM (oil?) signal is beginning to fade but the transmissometer signal (murkiness due to bacteria?) is increasing and the oxygen levels are decreasing (bacterial respiration as they chow down on the "oil?"). That's exactly what we saw last time so no surprises, but it's nice to be repeating the stations and confirming those results.
      Also on our agenda today was picking up the two observers. They are:
           * Dan Rutz (sp?) from NOAA
           * Susan Fisher from EPA

     Neither has been on a ship before; Susan is a data manager and Dan is a computer programmer and they have been assigned to help us record and verify our samples which will be a big plus for us. They are required to submit reports that include every sample at every depth at every station (hundreds of bottles!) as well as maps and shape files (for GIS) on everything we do. We will certainly have a complete record of this cruise when they're through!
      Last night I promised to describe my camera system which hasn't made it into the water yet but it will soon. I hope. Why bother with a deep sea camera when you're looking for oil? Good question, if I do say so myself. In way of background, I did my dissertation work looking at natural aggregates of organic matter that are ubiquitous in the ocean and referred to as "marine snow" because of their appearance through the windows of a submersible. Well, to study these, we developed a camera system that uses "collimated" light to define a volume of water. So all you have to do is take a picture of this volume of water and count all of the "snow flakes" in it and you have a measure of the concentration of these aggregates. The original systems used Fresnel lenses and film cameras but the new one has a custom-built strobe system and a digital camera so it's relatively state of the art. Of course it also has a CTD on board (salinity, temperature and depth, you HAVE to measure those!) and I have a CDOM fluorometer (to look for oil), a chlorophyll fluorometer, a transmissometer, and an optical backscatter sensor, so it's a pretty complete package. The only thing it lacks is an oxygen sensor and it lacks that because I loaned it to Kevin. I hope he appreciates that! The whole system is mounted on an aluminum frame (lots of hose clamps involved) and it's lowered at a painfully slow 10 meters per minute all the way to the seafloor. Well, not quite to the seafloor; we don't want to get mud all over it.
      Tomorrow's agenda calls for, what else, CTD casts. Lots and lots of them. Endless casts. And then, at night, we'll head for Gulfport to drop off our journalist (Justin Gillis), pick up a corer (well, it's actually a grab sampler) and try to get some more dry ice for our samples. And then back out to sea again. We're planning to end the cruise on June 7th so it's a while from now but the time will go quickly.
      Time flies when you're doing work as interesting as this has been. —Vernon

     It's hard to believe that I'm back here at Ground Zero again after having been on shore for scarcely a week. But life throws curves at you sometimes and here I am. This time, I'm on the R/V Walton Smith from the University of Miami. Another difference this time is that I'm the only Mississippian; the rest are from the University of Georgia. Well, except for Justin Gillis of the New York Times; he lives in Manhattan so he's not even a Southerner. This cruise is also not funded by NOAA, like the last one was. Instead, it's funded by the National Science Foundation through a RAPID grant to Dr. Samantha (Mandy) Joye who is also a partner in NIUST and who is working on samples from the last cruise. Or at least she will be when she gets back on shore.
      Those differences aside, this cruise is very similar to the last one in that we're still stalking the elusive deep oil. We're using the same fluorescence techniques but we also have a gas chromatograph on board so that we can run some quick analyses to see if there is any oil in the samples that we're collecting. We will use this suite of instruments to gather as much data as we can regarding the distribution of the oil (if it is oil!) and we'll be collecting lots of samples for all kinds of analyses to really nail it down.
      The excitement on site today was the attempt by BP to plug the leak using the "Top Kill" approach which involves a LOT of heavy mud and several large ships and platforms. We noticed first thing this morning that the Enterprise had stopped "flaring" the gas that it was collecting from the siphon tube in one of the leaks. I'm not sure that is related to "Top Kill" but even now, at 02:00 in the morning, they haven't started flaring yet so you have to wonder what's going on.
      I plan to spend the rest of the night (yes, ALL night long) doing the CTDs and then I'll sleep in until who knows when in the morning (afternoon?). And then get up and start it all over again.
      In tomorrow's report, I'll tell you all about my camera system and what it's all about. I'll also try to post a photo or two but our bandwidth is very limited so they might be pretty small photos.
      Until then, —Vernon (3 miles away from Ground Zero and heading even further away)

Work is ongoing with the oil spill in the Gulf. Last week I finished with an expedition to the spill site. Basically, we tried to stay just outside the affected area to get water and sediment samples. In this way, we can compare future collections against these baseline figures and make intelligent determinations about the impact of the spill. We found there's actually quite a bit of oil that has not reached the surface. If it can sink to the floor, there are bacteria there that can begin breaking it down. However, we simply do not know how quickly these bacteria can begin work, and we do not know the impact of the vast amount of chemical dispersants in use at the site of the well. I'll be going back to the Gulf on Tuesday for another expedition. Again, we'll be looking to collect as much data as possible from uncontaminated areas, while revisiting some of the sites of previous data collections to see how these areas have been affected since our last collections. I had an interview with Katie Couric today in Grand Isle, Louisiana to answer some questions about the impact on marine life. Below are some pictures. —Vernon

            Our cruise is drawing to an end and we are now looking forward to some rest and the pleasure of analyzing our data.  Today, we finished the last CTD cast and then did a long (~30 miles, 7 hours) transect with the Acrobat to look at the gradient in oil (fluorescence signal) as we steamed away from the cruise.  I’ve posted a few images of this process on the web site but it’s worth mentioning that everyone on board was pleased and even impressed with how will this towed package worked.  
            So, what’s next?  Well that’s a really good question.  On one hand, we are so intrigued with the results that we’ve obtained and we feel such a connection with it that we are anxious to get back out here to continue the work and to start to answer the myriad questions that this cruise has generated regarding the composition of the plumes of material that we mapped and what their ultimate fate will be.  But on the other hand, this is not our specialty and we acknowledge that others who do specialize in this work should now be brought in to apply more specific and definitive techniques.  Many of these scientists can be found within the Gulf of Mexico Hydrates Research Consortium which includes scientists from over and from all relevant disciplines.
            Someone asked me what I’d like to do next in terms of studying the oil.  Well, if money were no object, I’d bring Alvin into the Gulf and travel down to the plume to observe and sample it firsthand.  Okay, that’s not so realistic so maybe a work-class ROV like they’re using to try to cap the well; that would be almost as good because you could see the high def video while you manipulate things with the “robotic arms.”   Again, that’s out of my price range so I’d settle for just lowering a camera into these plumes to see what’s there.  How big are the particles?  What color are they?  Are things feeding on them?  Are they settling and if so, how rapidly?  Some of these things you can determine using samples from water bottles but others, well, you just have to “be” there.
            Of course I think we could also make some significant contributions with the AUVs.  The large one, Eagle Ray, is sort of a pickup truck of AUVs; it has a relatively large area that is open and can accommodate other sensors and equipment.  Just last year, we used it to carry a mass spectrometer over the MC118 hydrates observatory looking for methane in the water.  This gadget (called Tethys and built by Rich Camilli at Woods Hole) was so sensitive that it allowed us to find several new, natural seeps where methane is bubbling out of the seafloor.  That was almost as much fun as finding this plume and of course, because these are natural sources, there are no pollution or negative impact considerations.  I think it would be useful to do that again, only this time use it to track the plumes of oil that we’ve found using either Rich’s mass spec or our own fluorometer.  Because it’s autonomous, it could be programmed to stay in the plume; if it sensed lower concentrations, it would turn and see if that improved or worsened the signal and so on.  This is one thing that AUVs do better than anything else in the world an we have one of the best in the world, sitting patiently in it’s shipping container at the dock in Cocodrie.
            Our little AUV could also make a contribution.  Because it can hover and take photographs, it could be used to study the plume close up and take photos over any time and space scales that we like.  And it can also hold other sensors so there are a lot of possible applications awaiting our fleet of vehicles.
            Well, this is my last entry so I’ll sign off by saying thanks for your interest in this information and for all of the emails offering suggestions and encouragement.  The Gulf Coast community and the citizens of Mississippi have a lot at stake here and it is my earnest prayer that we are spared the most damaging impacts of this event and that we are able to learn from it some new insights into how the ocean works and how we can better protect it.

Until our next research enterprise,
Vernon (Still on the RV Pelican, but only for a few more hours)

DR. VERNON ASPER (DMS) Friday, May 14, 2010

            Another day has come to an end as we complete our cruise.  Another very long day.  We started out the day in some pretty rough conditions but we were able to complete lots of CTD casts, in search of the limits of the deep plume of oil.  We followed it as far as 30 miles from ground zero and, while the fluorescence signal (related to the oil) died out within about 10 miles, the oxygen and beam attenuation signals persisted faintly as far as 20 miles from the well.  It appears that the extent of the most significant part of the plume is about 5 miles wide by maybe 15 miles long.  There are several of these but the strongest is at 1300m, give or take a few, and its depth seems to change with distance from the well and with time.  Clearly this is a dynamic system and there is a lot to be learned here so we will be requesting some input from plume experts and physical oceanographers.
            I want to tell you about one other type of sampling we’re doing out here, one that is featured in the latest photos.  I hope the owner of the instrument (Sylvia Musielewicz at NOAA) isn’t offended when I describe this piece of equipment as being rather homely.  But it is.  Well, at least compared to the Acrobat and the little VideoRay ROV which, by the way, is about as cute as oceanographic equipment gets.  Sylvia’s device was designed and built for the express purpose of recording the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and in the ocean as monitored from a buoy.  So you see, it doesn’t have to be handsome because it spends its time enclosed in an instrument well, in a buoy, perhaps dozens or more miles from shore.  As you can see in the photo, it consists of several cylindrical housings, one of which contains the instrument itself, and the other of which contains batteries and who knows what else.  But the unique feature of the system is a buoyant “bobber” that positions the water intake just below the sea surface, even if that surface is moving.  I posted a video so that you could see this thing in action.  Okay, so it’s not going to make it to Netflix any time soon, but you can see from the action that the bobber is very effective at keeping the intake just below the sea surface.  The data that we collected will go to Sylvia at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory where she will compare them to other data to evaluate the effect of the oil spill on the of CO2 content of the air and water.  Pretty neat stuff and we’re really pleased that we could bring this piece of gear along.
            Some of the other photos show the CTD rosette coming and going as it was deployed over and over.  One photo shows Matt Lowe about to recover the package.  He works for Ole Miss and is an extremely valuable person to have along on a cruise like this.  And I’m not even referring to his amazing talent to conceive, fabricate, modify, and repair equipment (he once scratch built a mechanical supercharger for his Honda 3-wheeler!), no, I’m talking here about his sense of humor and his always upbeat attitude.  You see, I’m not always like that, and when I get tired, as I am now, well, I tend to get a little grumpy.  Not Matt; he’s level all the time and he keeps us all on an even keel.  Oh, and he’s the best I’ve seen at putting things into the water and, more importantly, getting them back!
            So, we’re doing CTD casts all night long.  I’m talking ALL night long!  And in the morning, we’ll pull it on board for the last time and replace it with the towed Acrobat package which we’ll tow slowly along the same transect we’ve just visited with the rosette sampler.  We’ll sort of “connect the dots” made by those stationary casts by collecting continuous data, if only near the surface, along the entire transect.  
            And then back to Cocodrie where we’ll hand over some of the samples to waiting scientists, offload our equipment and pack the 4 or 5 vehicles that will take the gear back to Ole Miss and Southern Miss.  We’ll follow or drive these trucks, of course, so that we can be there to offload, clean (lots of oil stains for some reason), and rinse the equipment before we put it away until next time.  We have collected a lot of really interesting data and getting to analyze it is for a scientist what reading a mystery novel is for normal people.  Not that scientists aren’t normal but, well, maybe we aren’t.

Until tomorrow,
Vernon

Below, video of the "homely" CO2 monitor in action.

Southern Miss Marine Science graduate student DongJoo Joung is featured in the video below making some spectral measurements at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion. Joung is a Ph.D. student in marine science who has ongoing chemical studies in this offshore region which are funded through a National Science Foundation grant awarded through Southern Miss Marine Science Professor Dr. Alan Shiller.

Below, Joung takes spectral measurements:

            Some days you have great, calm weather and smooth seas and, well, some days are like today.  Not so great, nor calm, nor smooth.  It wasn’t awful, I’ve seen a lot worse, but it was enough to slow us down and to prevent us from engaging in some of our planned sampling.  For example, Dongjoo, the grad student from USM, likes to use the small boat to collect his samples in order to avoid contamination from the ship.  Well, it was too rough to launch the small boat and, even if we had launched it, I don’t think they’d have had much fun in it today.  So, instead of this approach, he used a long, plastic pole with a bottle attached to the end.  I took some photos of this ritual and posted them on the ftp site. I say “ritual” because there was the ceremonial swishing and dipping, followed by pouring and capping and it was all accomplished in a very prescribed manner.  But that’s how real trace metal chemists are; they are necessarily paranoid about contamination and will go to whatever lengths are necessary to get the best samples possible.  Dongjoo also does the spectral measurements and I posted a photo of him using the ASD (even he doesn’t know what that stands for; we’re swimming in acronyms) to measure the color of the sky and water.
            Aside from that, it was CTD casts all night and all day, in search of the elusive deep sea hydrocarbon plume.  We had detected this earlier using the CDOM fluorometer but the signal was also there in the form of reduced oxygen and water clarity (beam attenuation).  By sampling in all directions from this initial point, we determined that the plume is extending southwest of the well site so we followed it to the point where we are right now, about 20 miles away.  Here, the fluorescence signal has faded but the oxygen and beam attenuation signals are still remarkably strong.  What does this mean?  Yet another good question.  There are lots of possibilities and we’ll need to analyze the numerous samples we’ve acquired from this plume before we can answer any of it.  One possibility is that the oil (if it is oil!) in the plume is being decomposed by bacteria as it drifts slowly to the southwest.  The farther out we sample it, the longer it has been drifting and the longer the microbes have had to work on it.  As they work, they consume oxygen so, if this hypothesis is valid, the oxygen levels should be the mirror the hydrocarbon levels, and if this is true, at some point the oil will be used up but the depleted oxygen signal will remain.  And the beam attenuation?  Again, we need to analyze the samples but it’s possible that it’s either the microbes themselves or some particulate matter that was suspended with or by the oil.  Sure, we’ve dumped samples from these plumes into buckets and squinted really hard but we don’t see anything like sediment particles so a more definitive test is warranted and that’ll have to wait for the analyses on shore.
It’s interesting to note that we saw essentially no oil today, in spite of the fact that we were “downwind” of the largest part of the oil slick as depicted on most of the maps.  That mass is centered southeast of the accident site and the wind was out of the ESE today but it wasn’t enough to push the oil over to our location and that means that the air was fresh and much more breathable today.
            Tonight we are going to work until about midnight and then heave to and let everyone get some rest so that we can hit the decks with some renewed enthusiasm tomorrow.  Weather permitting, we’ll extend this line a few miles further out to the southwest and then probably turn around and repeat the close in stations to see if anything has changed there.  On our last day at sea, Saturday, we plan to repeat some of the coring work to see if anything has changed at a few select sites, possibly tow the Acrobat some more, collect some more water samples for Dongjoo, and then head for Cocodrie.      

That’s all for tonight; tomorrow I’ll describe the “interesting” pCO2 sensor that we’ve also been working with and we’ll post more photos to the re-organized ftp site.

Until then,
Vernon

Below, a short video of the careful water sampling: 

            Today we made what may turn out to be one of the most important discoveries of the trip.  Or it could be nothing; it’s too early to tell.  As I’ve mentioned earlier, we are most interested in the oil that is NOT at the surface and that is therefore not visible to satellites or aircraft.  Because we are the first scientists on the scene (and apparently the only ones so far), we have the opportunity to survey the area surrounding the well using the techniques at hand, including the Acrobat profiling towed vehicle that I described last night.  This process went very well and we were able to confirm that the signal did, in fact, increase when oil was visible to observers on deck and it decreased when no oil was apparent.  Following the completion of a complete, 10 x 10 mile box around the well, we made a normal station at a point southwest of the well, including sampling for trace metals, a box core and a CTD with the fluorometer attached.  Unlike other casts, this one recorded the presence of several layers of “material” at depths from 700 to over 1300m.  Intrigued by this discovery, we decided to try to map this feature to see if it was emanating from the well, so we lowered the CTD at sites 2.5 and then 1.25 miles from the well.  As expected, the signals (fluorescence, oxygen depletion, and beam attenuation, which is a measure of water clarity) all increased as we approached the well.  We spent the rest of the day acquiring samples to the south, southeast and then northwest of the well and concluded that the highest signals are to the southwest.
            What is causing this signal?  We’d really like to know but probably won’t be able to determine that answer conclusively during this cruise.  For one thing, we can’t even tell if it’s caused by particles or “dissolved” substances.  I put “dissolved” in quotes because oceanographers use an arbitrary definition of what dissolved means: anything that will pass through a 0.45 micron filter is so small that we consider it to be dissolved, although lots of chemists would argue with that.  The point here is that organic material, like oil, doesn’t really dissolve in water but it can act like it has and be advected by the flow of water over long distances.  On the other hand, as we’ve seen at the surface, oil can coagulate and start to sink so it can act as a particle in that sense, and it’s ultimate fate will depend, at least in part, on how it acts.  So, we plan to continue the mapping effort to see if the material is settling, advecting, dissolving, diffusing, or what.  As I write this, we are completing our 40th lowering of the CTD package so we are generating a lot of data.
            Also of note today was the odd collection of nearly a dozen pyrosomas that were attached to the acrobat when we recovered it this morning.  These are named for the latin pyro (fire) and soma (body) because they are one of the most bioluminescent organisms in the ocean and are quite impressive to see at night.  Well, when they aren’t dead and drooped over your sampling equipment.
            We were very close to the operation at the accident site all day so we were able to observe their activities and noted that two of the vessels were spraying some kind of liquid, presumably water, into the air for hours on end.  It looked like they had their firefighting equipment in operation but why they were aiming the torrent into the air and why for so long remains a mystery.
            We have been inundated by requests for the freshest oil we can find at the surface, mostly from chemists who want to characterize it so that it can be tracked and traced back to its source.  To obtain this oil, we went to the source, the area where the least disturbed oil is reaching the surface.  Ordinarily, this would be the site of considerable skimming and even burning activity but a fair swell (maybe 3-5’) was running today and the boom vessels were unable to work so we did not interfere with their activity.  To sample this material, we used a bucket over the side and scooped the floating oil into glass vials (lots of them) for delivery to whomever requests a sample.  Well, within reason; the supply is not unlimited!
            We will continue the CTD mapping effort tonight and continue with coring and other water sampling in the morning. We need to leave the site on Saturday evening so we have just 3 more days in which to sample and that time will go very quickly.

Until tomorrow,
Vernon

          We remain pleased that the weather is much better than forecast and we continue to work productively.   Wind has been generally light and the seas have been favorable but we are beginning to pick up some swell from the south that complicates our deck operations.   Our team was frustrated in the early morning hours by two box cores that failed to recover any sediment in 1336m of water and we finally gave up and hove to at about 04:00 but were up and working again by 7:30.  Our first station (site 29) was 9.6 miles northeast of ground zero and had medium oil (heavy sheen, patches of emulsified oil) on the surface.  After sampling there, we launched the Acrobat for the first time. This is a towed vehicle that has a movable plane on its bow that allows it to climb and descend through the upper water column as it is towed behind the ship.  It has the normal CTD (Conductivity = salinity, Temperature, and Depth) sensors but we also put our CDOM fluorometer on it as well.  As noted in previous emails, this sensor is intended to provide indications of the presence or absence of oil through a fluorescence process.  By towing it through the water, we obtain a two dimensional cross section of the oil distribution.  We plan to tow this between all sampling stations and we are currently towing it around Ground Zero in a box with 9 mile legs, a process that should take all night.  I get the first watch to I’m here from 22:00 until 02:00 when Max will take over.  The watch isn’t all that hard; just watch the computer screen, change log files now and then, check the tow lines, and go out on deck to check for surface oil now and then.  Oh, and drink coffee; I think that’s required.
            On the way to our close-in sampling site, we towed the Acrobat essentially right over GZ but never saw any significant oil.  We actually went between the huge drilling platform and the drill ship, both of which are drilling relief holes and no one seemed to mind.  It’s clear that BP isn’t trying to keep “prying eyes” away from this site.
            At each station, we are using our little ROV to get video of the oil aggregates and whatever else is in the water.  Surprisingly, although the poor little thing (you can easily pick it up with one hand!) gets a lot of oil on it, this oil wipes off easily and doesn’t seem to stain anything. I’m not sure if that’s because of the dispersant effects or what but it’s a pleasant surprise.  We’re seeing a good number of fish at various depths and, as before, they don’t seem to mind the oil.
            But the aggregates!  Wow, they’re amazing. I think I mentioned before that I did my Ph.D. dissertation on natural organic aggregates called “marine snow”. Well, these “oil aggregates” look exactly like the natural ones so I’m convinced that some of the same processes are involved and that a lot of what we learned by studying the behavior of the natural ones will apply to these oil aggregates.  For one thing, they’re both composed of stuff that normally floats but, when aggregated and ballasted, it sinks.  Well, today, the aggregates are huge; not the cute little puffy ones that we saw earlier but big (up to a meter long!), thin strands of stringy oil.  I really wanted you to see this, so I’ve attaché a photo of it.  Okay, so they’re not all that pretty; oil usually isn’t.  But they are most likely really important for the oil removal process so we’re looking forward to learning more about how they form and what happens to them.
            Tomorrow, we’ll continue our station work with more coring, water sampling, ocean color measurements, ROV ops and all the rest.  As always, please let me know if you have comments, questions or suggestions.

Regards from 5 miles east of ground zero, steaming north,
Vernon

1. towed Acrobat profiling vehicle fitted with CDOM fluorometer intended to produce two dimensional sections of physical properties as well as a qualitative indication of the presence of hydrocarbons.
2. HARP, a seafloor-mounted acoustic monitoring device that will be placed in the research section of MC118 where it will record marine mammal calls for later analyses
3. ASD, a multispectral sensor that will be used to measure the intensity and color of light from the sun and reflected from the sea surface; these data will be used to ground-truth NASA over-flights that are scheduled to start tomorrow
4. CO2 sensor, a large sensor intended for buoy mounting but, in our case, will be suspended from the side at each station
5. Trace metal sampling to determine whether trace metals can be used to track the dispersal of the hydrocarbons.
6. An ROV to measure the concentration of oil aggregates at various depths in the upper water column
7. Box coring for more samples and with additional subsampling for specific programs.
8. Other water sampling to fulfill requests from various investigators.
9. I, personally, hope to be able to hand-sample some oil aggregates using a syringe so that their contents can be studied using microscopic and chemical techniques.

This was an interesting day, with some surprises, including the announcement that the dome that was intended to capture the escaping oil had been clogged by the formation of gas hydrates.  The irony of this report is that our Gulf of Mexico Gas Hydrates Consortium has been studying this phenomenon for nearly 10 years at a nearby site with funding from NOAA, MMS, DOE, and support from NIUST.  As you probably know, hydrates are formed when, under the right conditions of temperature and pressure, gas and water combine to form a crystal lattice that resembles white ice.  This material forms spontaneously in nature as well as inside pipes and equipment placed on the seafloor during hydrocarbon recovery efforts.  Our studies have focused on investigating the rates of formation, the stability, and the composition of the hydrates as well as the interaction between the chemistry and the biological community living in proximity to the hydrates on the seafloor.  Scientists from around the world have collaborated in this endeavor and an impressive array of novel sensors and sampling equipment have been developed and deployed at this site, including some that remain in place.  The web site for more information is http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/mmri/programs/gulf_res.html and I suggest that you contact Carol Lutken (cc’d above) for additional details.
      After our last core of the day yesterday, we once again hove to, this time at a site 20 miles due east of the Deepwater Horizon site.  At that time (midnight), the winds were calm and no oil or odor were evident.  At 04:00, however, the winds picked up from the west and a sheen of oil arrived and, along with it, a distinctive hydrocarbon odor.  From there to our next station, sited at 2 miles due south of the DH rig, we recorded observations of the oil characteristics every 15 minutes (see linked “oil observations” table).  As this table records, we passed through some areas of high concentrations of oil while others were moderate or clear.  The skimmer fleet was north of us during this transit so we presume that the oil was even heavier in that area.  This was truly an impressive sight.  While the skimmer fleet is doing an amazing job of containing the oil, a considerable amount of it remains in a large slick that is extremely unpleasant to see or smell. I sincerely hope that the BP team is able to continue to keep this oil under control and that none of it ends up on Gulf Coast beaches!
      Following this transit, we acquired cores at 4 additional sites starting near the DH rig (site 24) and progressing in to a site near the Southwest Pass of the Mississippi River (site 27).  Nothing anomalous was seen in or on any of these sediment cores with the possible exception of roughly 6 dead euphausids at site 24.  Although this is an unusual find and we see no definitive link to the oil, we do intend to follow up on this observation by acquiring an additional sample from this location for the express purpose of carefully preserving such organisms for further study.
      The shallow site (27) was in only 17m of water and was adjacent to one of the areas in Louisiana where oil had been reported as washing ashore.  Our intent here was to investigate whether oil had also been deposited on the seafloor but we saw none either on the surface or on the sediments.  This site is characterized by rather fresh water (11ppt salinity) due to the river discharge both to the west and to the east.  It can be expected that this discharge will displace the ocean surface water and help to buffer the shoreline from oil deposition except during strong southerly winds.
      We are currently headed back to Cocodrie (expected eta 06:30) where we will exchange personnel and pick up new equipment for the second leg.  This will include a towed package (Acrobat) with CDOM fluorometer tuned to detect hydrocarbons, an ROV for investigating subsurface oil aggregates, a multispectral sensor for ground-truthing NASA flyovers, an innovative pCO2 sensor, an acoustic recorder intended to monitor marine mammals, and a collection of supplies for preserving plankton, water, and sediment samples.  We hope to be paving the way for future, more detailed investigations of all critical aspects and impacts of this event.

Below is a short video showing what it's like traveling between sampling stations. Get your sea legs under you, it gives the sensation of the rolling waves.

The second photo (6887 at left) shows the surface of the water at the current sampling location. Okay, so it's not all that photogenic but it gives you a really good idea of what we're seeing out here. On the surface is a very light sheen of oil, as you'd expect to see with an oil spill. Along with that are the tan clumps of oil ranging in size from pea to pancake. Some of these can be very filamentous in shape but others are just ragged clumps of oil, appearing almost as if there were some kind of fiber involved. Most interesting to us, however are the smaller clumps (I'm calling them oil aggregates) that appear below the surface. It's counter-intuitive to see "oil" sink below the surface but you have to remember that this isn't motor oil, it's crude oil and there are all kinds of compounds in it, including many that are heavier than water. Apparently, the dispersants that they are spreading on the surface (using C-130's and ancient DC-3s that have been retrofitted with turbo-prop engines) are causing this oil to coagulate into these relatively large clumps. This reduces the amount of surface area, which causes drag, for the amount of oil volume, so if they're heavier than water, they'll sink more rapidly than they would have, had they not aggregated. The question is, what happens to this oil after it leaves the surface? How rapidly does it sink? How far down has it been able to travel so far? What effect is it having on the midwater ecosystem? What will its ultimate fate be? We are planning to bring some novel gear along next time to investigate some of these questions but it's clear that some long term monitoring will be required to address many of these issues.

One of the instruments that we'll bring along next time is a small (some call it "micro") Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV). We'll use this to qualitatively describe the concentration of oil aggregates in the surface layer down to about 75m, which is as far as it can go. We'll also be looking at the plankton in the water and maybe even the nekton (fish) if any come around. In addition, NIUST has a really large ROV that is capable of placing and recovering relatively large instruments on the sea floor and we expect to have that on site in the weeks to come but not for the next leg.

A final note: I've been surprised by the total absence of dead animals out here. Granted, it's an "oligotrophic" environment (blue water, low nutrients, sparse concentration of anything living) but still, I was expecting to see the occasional dead fish, oiled bird, rotting jellyfish. Instead, we've seen flying fish that skim along the surface, and schools of needle fish and others that seem oblivious to the oil and that's a surprise. It's still early so the toxic effects may not have had their full effect but this clearly demands some closer investigation.