Continuing their efforts of determining the effects of the oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana State U. researchers are now focusing on mapping spilled oil’s movement with sophisticated imagery, simulating deep water’s influence on dispersants and testing oil’s effects on oysters’ health.
These professors, working from different University departments, discussed their ongoing efforts Friday during the School of the Coast and Environment’s first of its weekly fall seminar series.
“There were a lot of wind reversals, more in this time period than I seem to remember for summer,” said Nan Walker, director of the Earth Scan Laboratory and an associate professor in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences. “Whenever the wind reverses from west to east, we get a flow around the [Mississippi River] Delta, and that’s when the oil actually reaches the Louisiana coast.”
Walker’s team of researchers used complex images taken by the University’s Earth Scan Laboratory and others provided by the University of Miami and the University of Colorado as well as NASA to map surface oil’s changing motion caused by winds and currents.
Where the oil spread, Walker said, “can be explained by the wind.” First, strong southeast winds drove oil to the Mississippi River Delta, then strong south/southwest winds moved the surface oil to the Mississippi/Florida/Alabama shelf “where it accumulated over the course of several weeks.” Then, more easterly winds moved oil into Lake Pontchartrain.
Dandina Rao, the Emmett C. Wells Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Craft and Hawkins Department of Petroleum Engineering, discussed his research in how deepwater conditions affect the behavior of oil and dispersants.
“The main purpose is to understand what those dispersants did to the oil plume coming out of the well,” Rao said.
Rao uses a special optical cell to adjust conditions — like pressure, temperature and water salinity — to see how dispersants affect the oil.
His research will take another year to complete, but Rao said he believes the project will show the dispersants and tension break oil into small droplets that fall to the sea floor, which is more problematic than having the oil at the surface, where it may easily be skimmed or burned.
Jerome La Peyre, an associate professor in the LSU AgCenter’s Veterinary Science Department, said he is researching “the impact of the oil on the oysters’ health,” by looking at individual oysters.
The oysters can be affected by acute or chronic symptoms, La Peyre said. Acute symptoms affect the larval stages while chronic symptoms cause decreased growth rates.
La Peyre said “phase one” uses baseline data from May. “Phase two” is underway as La Peyre compares samples taken from oiled and non-oiled sites, while “phase three,” securing future projects and funding, is farther in the future.
The seminar series continues Sept. 17 with “An Overview of LSU Research on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Part 2” and includes presentations from four more researchers.