FSU Takes Action in the Gulf
A religion scholar will visit The Florida State University this week to discuss his work with corporate and government researchers in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to determine the biological, ecological, economic and cultural effects of the spill.
Michael Pasquier, an assistant professor of American religious history at Louisiana State University, will speak on “Standard Lives: Visualizing Oil and Religion in Louisiana.” His lecture, which is free and open to the public, draws upon a stock of photographs taken between the early and mid-20th century, all focused on the oil culture of Louisiana and the place of religion in it. It will take place:
WEDNESDAY, NOV. 10
5 P.M.
BROAD AUDITORIUM
CLAUDE PEPPER CENTER, 636 W. CALL ST.
THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
Pasquier, who received his Ph.D. in religion from Florida State in 2007, teaches courses in U.S. religious history, Christianity, and world religions at LSU. He is a recent Visiting Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass. (2009-2010). His research focuses on the history of Roman Catholicism in the American South, Catholic devotional culture, and religion in colonial Louisiana. Pasquier recently has published “Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789-1870” (Oxford University Press, 2009).
He is currently conducting a new research project on the intersection of African religions, American Indian religions and Christianity in the Lower Mississippi Valley during the 18th century, as well as editing a volume of essays on the study of religion and culture along the Mississippi River.
The National Science Foundation and the Department of Biological Science at Florida State are hosting an invited workshop, “Long-Term Ecological Effects of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on Coastal Ecosystems.”
The purpose of this workshop, scheduled for Sept. 10-12 at the Augustus B. Turnbull III Florida State Conference Center in Tallahassee, will be to organize the long-term responses of ecologists to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the environmental effects of which could persist for decades in coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists must quantify these effects in ways that will best allow for understanding and responding to the disaster.
Workshop attendance is by invitation only; Florida State faculty and students who are interested in more information may contact T.E. Miller or E. Gornish at (850) 644-8575 or egornish@bio.fsu.edu.
Additional information on the workshop is available here.
A distinguished group of Florida State University oceanographers, meteorologists, and marine biologists and ecologists will share a new, $500,000 grant from the Northern Gulf Institute to conduct a comprehensive study of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill’s impact on coastal and ocean marine ecosystems in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico.
“This project will take us beyond shock and anxiety to show us what has really happened and suggest where the remediation efforts must lead us,” said College of Arts and Sciences Dean Joseph Travis, a biologist recognized for his work in population ecology.
Multiple teams of two or three Florida State researchers will be integrating the findings from their respective portions of the study to create a detailed, multipronged assessment of conditions along the northern West Florida Shelf, which stretches from the Panhandle’s Big Bend Region west to Louisiana.
The interdisciplinary, rapid-response project will be completed within about five months, according to FSU Coastal and Marine Laboratory Director Felicia Coleman, who will help to lead the portion of the study that examines the potential for crude oil pollutants to concentrate in shelf-edge habitat “engineered” by fishery species.
Project teams will include several members of the Department of Biological Science faculty who are based at the Coastal and Marine Laboratory, and researchers from the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science and the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS).
The Northern Gulf Institute is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Cooperative Institute that involves partnerships with universities across the northeastern Gulf of Mexico, including Florida State University.
Additional information about the study is available on the FSU Coastal and Marine Laboratory website at www.marinelab.fsu.edu/news/.
With nearly $200,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation, researchers at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at The Florida State University are using incredibly precise analytical tools housed at the lab to analyze petroleum samples collected from the Gulf of Mexico. Results of those analyses will help determine whether or not the samples originated from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill — critical information in predicting where the oil is going.
Amy M. McKenna is an assistant scholar/scientist in the laboratory of Professor Alan G. Marshall, the director of the magnet lab’s Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance (FT-ICR) mass spectrometry facility. McKenna is the principal investigator for an NSF Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant titled “Molecular Level Characterization and Archive for the 2010 BP Oil Spill,” which will provide $198,790 in funding for one year.
McKenna and her colleagues, including co-principal investigators Marshall and associate scholar/scientist Ryan P. Rodgers, have already begun analyzing samples of raw crude oil, ocean surface samples and tar balls collected by researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at various distances from the Deepwater Horizon site. Also joining the Magnet Lab team is visiting scientist Chang Samuel Hsu, a veteran petroleum researcher who was the key scientist involved in developing analytical methodologies for the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.
The collaboration with Woods Hole makes for a powerful analytical combination. McKenna said collaborators at Woods Hole are the best at they do, which is analyzing oil collected from the well head using a technique called chromatography. But once that oil gets spewed out into the open world, it’s exposed to the environment, which changes the oil’s composition.
“An oil spill changes its chemical composition due to evaporation and dissolution over time,” McKenna said. “The incorporation of oxygen into the components makes it difficult for other analytical techniques to characterize the molecules of spilled oil. FT-ICR mass spectrometry is the only technique that can look at these changes at the molecular level without prior, tedious sample preparation.”
The team’s ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive compositional archive for all future chemical characterizations of the spill, because the magnet lab’s high-powered magnets and custom-built spectrometers are the only tools capable of analyzing the oil on such a precise molecular level.
“We will have a library of what is in there. Then everyone else will know what they’re dealing with,” said Marshall, FSU’s Robert O. Lawton Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “The more you know about what it is, the better you can decide what to do about it.”
Marshall is widely recognized as having revolutionized the field of chemical analysis. He co-invented and continues to develop FT-ICR mass spectrometry, a powerful analytical procedure capable of resolving and identifying thousands of different chemical components in complex mixtures ranging from petroleum to biological fluids.
In recent years, Marshall’s research group has received a great deal of attention for its development of “petroleomics,” an entirely new branch of chemistry that seeks to predict the properties and behavior of petroleum and its products.
A Florida State University oceanography professor is questioning government estimates that the vast majority of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill is already gone from the Gulf or is being rapidly broken down by bacteria.
“I think the imprint of the BP release, the discharge, will be detectable in the Gulf of Mexico for the rest of my life,’ Ian MacDonald told a congressional hearing on the spill. He was quoted in an Aug. 20 Wall Street Journal article that also referred to the findings of other scientists who had observed a vast underwater plume of hydrocarbons the size of Manhattan near the site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
A giant, low-oxygen “dead zone” where no sea life can exist occurs each summer in the Gulf of Mexico. However, the added effects of this year’s Deepwater Horizon oil disaster raise new questions about just how much environmental degradation the Gulf can handle, Bloomberg News reports.
“You start adding these things up, and there’s a question of what the cumulative effect is and how much additional stress the ecosystem can take,” said Kevin Craig, an assistant scholar/scientist at the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory who has studied oxygen depletion for a decade.
The dead zone, caused by chemical runoff into the Mississippi River that flows into the Gulf, is estimated to be the size of Massachusetts this year.
The damage to wildlife from the oil spill and the dead zone could be compounded by hurricanes, Craig warned. Tropical storms could flush animals out of their marsh habitats and damage oyster beds.
While the Gulf can recover from hurricanes and low oxygen, the effects of the oil spill remain a long-term concern.
“How it’s going to influence hypoxia or wildlife or fisheries is an unknown,” Craig said.
Click here to read the full Bloomberg article.
Five research projects related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and led by Florida State University faculty members have been selected for funding by the Florida Institute of Oceanography’s governing council.
The five were among a total of 27 research projects aimed at examining the vast impacts of the Gulf oil spill that were chosen for funding; between them, they received $9 million provided by oil company BP. The projects were selected from 233 proposals submitted by researchers at the 20 Florida Institute of Oceanography member institutions and reviewed by top scientists from around Florida. The institute’s governing council approved the grants on Aug. 12.
The council did not identify funding levels for each project but instead opted to ask researchers to revisit their individual cost estimates and consider ways to lower costs by sharing limited resources, such as vessel time, in an effort to further stretch research dollars. Those negotiations will begin immediately, said William Hogarth, acting director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography and dean of the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science.
The institute is a consortium of public and private marine science centers and institutes in Florida that have worked cooperatively for more that four decades on scientific projects on Florida’s waters and along its 1,200 miles of coastline.
Researchers will examine the full scope of the spill, from investigating the effect of Deepwater Horizon oil and dispersants on reefs, corals and salt marshes to examining how coastal and marine food webs, from planktons to sharks, have fared in the disaster.
The research projects that are led by Florida State faculty members are as follows:
- “Tracing the intrusion of the GOM-2010 oil spill on coastal and marine food webs radiocarbon and stable isotope,” led by Jeffrey P. Chanton, the John Widmer Winchester Professor of Oceanography in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science. (Researchers from Florida A&M University and the U.S. Geological Survey will also participate in the project.)
- “Assessment of deepwater fish assemblages associated with DeSoto Canyons and continental slope waters in the eastern GOM,” led by Ralph Dean Grubbs, an assistant scholar scientist at the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory.
- “Penetration, accumulation and degradation of BP DWH oil in Florida sandy beaches,” led by Markus Huettel, a professor of biological oceanography in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science. (Researchers from Eckerd College will also participate in the project.)
- “Coast watch: Remote sensing and verification sampling of oil spill impact on Florida coast,” led by Ian MacDonald, a professor of oceanography in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science. (Researchers from the University of West Florida will also participate in the project.)
- “Effects of the BP oil spill on diatoms, nanoplankton and related protists at the base of the food chain in the NE Gulf of Mexico,” led by Sherwood W. Wise Jr., a professor of paleontology in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science. (Researchers from Mississippi State University will also participate in the project.)
Florida State researchers are also participating in three additional research projects funded by the Florida Institute of Oceanography:
- "The Deepwater Horizon oil spill: Assessing impacts on a critical habitat, oyster reefs and associated species in Florida Gulf estuaries," in collaboration with researchers from Florida Atlantic University, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at FAU and Florida Gulf Coast University; and
- “A coordinated modeling approach in support of oil spill tracking,” in collaboration with researchers from the University of South Florida and the University of Miami; and
- “Integrative biodiversity assessment of coral sponge communities of W. Florida shelf: establishing a baseline for a sensitive ecosystem,” in collaboration with researchers from the University of Florida, the Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce and Nova Southeastern University.
A complete list of funded research projects is posted on the Florida Institute of Oceanography website.
This week, two Florida State University oceanography professors dug trenches on a stretch of Pensacola Beach that had recently been cleaned of visible oil and tar balls. What they found, reports National Geographic, was unsettling: Large swaths of oil up to 2 feet deep remained.
“So far, we haven’t seen any rapid degradation in these deep layers,” said Professor Markus Huettel, although he noted that oil at the top of the sand has been disappearing within days.
Huettel and colleague Joel Kostka are biological oceanographers who have been studying the effectiveness of microbes at breaking down oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill. They said that whether microbes munch the oil — the most common way oil breaks down — depends on how much oxygen is available for the tiny organisms to do their work. Unfortunately, much of that oil gets trapped underground when tiny oil droplets penetrate porous sand or when waves deposit tar balls and then cover them with sand.
Oil is no longer spewing from the damaged Deepwater Horizon drilling site, but how the oil that is already spilled will continue to effect Gulf ecosystems is largely unknown. Ian MacDonald, a professor of oceanography at Florida State, shared his thoughts during an Aug. 1 interview on NPR.
“The question is: Will the Gulf of Mexico, as a result of this, be a less productive ecosystem?” MacDonald said. “And if the productivity and the biodiversity were to be diminished by a few percentage points — 10 percent, 15 percent — that might be very hard to document. Nonetheless, this would be an effect. And if you stretched it out over several years, it would be a severe effect on the ecosystem and the wellbeing of the people that depend on this ecosystem.”
MacDonald also suggested that any fines paid by “should be put in a permanent trust to assess, to understand, and to sustain the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem for the future generations.”
Read a transcript of the interview here.
Felicia Coleman
“There’s a tremendous amount of outrage with the oil spill, and rightfully so. But where’s the outrage at the thousands and millions of little cuts we’ve made on a daily basis?”
— Felicia Coleman, director of Florida State’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory, quoted in The New York Times on July 29, 2010. Coleman was discussing how the Gulf of Mexico had been suffering from the cumulative effects of pollution for decades prior to this year’s Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.
