GISR: Natural Gas Seeps in Gulf of Mexico

What impact do natural hydrocarbon seeps have on the ocean and atmosphere? This is one of the key questions we’ll be investigating on this leg of the expedition. This expedition is part of the Gulf Integrated Spill Response (GISR) Consortium, funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI). The vision of the GISR Consortium is to understand and predict the fundamental behavior of petroleum fluids in the ocean environment. This capability is critical to inform decisions during response to oil spills and for development of mitigation plans, ultimately yielding significant environmental and financial savings. The mission of the currently funded activities is to develop a multi-scale modeling system validated by field and laboratory experiments to track the pathways of transforming hydrocarbons released from deep oil seeps in the oceans. Scientists will acoustically and visually map the bubble/droplet plume through the water column at several different times (about once or twice per day) while on-site.