April 22, 2013

Drift Cards Dropped In Gulf Can Reveal Ocean Current Data

Coming soon to a beach near you: a “drift card” washing up on Gulf of Mexico shores that is part of a research project at Texas A&M University to study ocean currents.

The brightly colored yellow cards have contact information requesting that finders report where they were found as one way of tracking currents in the Gulf, says Piers Chapman, head of oceanography at Texas A&M. The project is conducted with funding from oil giant BP as part of its Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative.

“It’s a fun way to track currents and to get people involved,” explains Chapman, who has done similar drift card projects before.

“The cards have contact information on them, asking the finder to call a number or email where he or she found the card, and there will be a monthly drawing for gift cards to encourage finders to respond. We released the first batch of 250 cards on April 6-8 and we’ve already had about 40 responses. In all, we will release about 5,000 in the next few months.”

The cards will enable oceanographers to improve prediction models and see how gas and oil travel along the currents of the Gulf.

So far, cards have been retrieved from Alabama to Panama City, Fla., Chapman says.

“The next several batches will be released farther west, so that’s when they will eventually wash up on Texas beaches,” he notes of the cards, written in English and Spanish because some of them will likely be found along the Mexican coast.

Chapman said he was involved in a similar project years ago while working in South Africa.

“We released drift cards like these and we got them returned from people in Brazil, Australia and along the east coast of Africa,” he recalls.

“In a project like this, the typical response rate in the open ocean is about 2 percent, but we are hoping to get a higher return rate in the Gulf of Mexico. However many are returned, we shall get some useful information that will improve our knowledge of Gulf currents.”

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Media contact: Keith Randall, News & Information Services, at (979) 845-4644 or Piers Chapman at (979) 845-7211

January 23, 2013

Ancient Life Forms From Seafloor Raise New Questions

Researchers including a Texas A&M University geomicrobiologist have discovered life at incredible depths – more than 350 feet below the ocean floor and 12,000 feet under the water – that could raise new questions about how life forms are able to exist in the most extreme environments.

Heath Mills, assistant professor of oceanography in the College of Geosciences, along with a former Texas A&M graduate student, Brandi Kiel Reese, now at the University of Southern California, and current Texas A&M graduate student Martha Ariza found fungi in sediments that could be at least 100 million years old, some of which belong to penicillium, from which penicillin is derived.

An article about the research appeared in Nature magazine.

Mills and the team examined sediment cores taken from an area of the Pacific Ocean during a 2010 research trip conducted by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, which is headquartered at Texas A&M.

They found several types of fungal species and were successful in growing four types in a lab setting.

“We were amazed that these fungi were alive and they could possibly be 100 million years old,” Mills explains.

“We examined them closer and found they were directly related to penicillin fungi. Needless to say, it was an exciting discovery and not something that we had expected.”

Mills says the findings could “open up new doors in a lot of different areas.

“When you find life forms hundreds of feet below the ocean seafloor and at extreme depths in the ocean, this is life adapted for some of the harshest extremes on the planet,” he notes.

“It raises new questions about how life can continue to exist. It also raises new questions about whatever life forms we could find in similar locations around the world.

“These cores were taken at one of the ‘deadest’ places on Earth, sites where you would not expect to find life. The fungi may have developed their own defense systems against harmful bacteria, and if that is true, how could these be used in medicines today? Is this a new form of penicillin, and if so, could it be stronger than what we have currently?

“All of these are questions that we need to examine,” Mills adds. “This discovery is important on several different levels.”

The project was funded by the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations and the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center.

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About Research at Texas A&M University: As one of the world’s leading research institutions, Texas A&M is in the vanguard in making significant contributions to the storehouse of knowledge, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represents an annual investment of more than $700 million. That research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state, nation and world.

Media contact: Keith Randall, News & Information Services, at (979) 845-4644 or Heath Mills at (979) 845-5105

September 28, 2012

Bombs In Gulf Of Mexico Pose Big Problems

Millions of pounds of unexploded bombs and other military ordnance that were dumped decades ago in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as off the coasts of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, could now pose serious threats to shipping lanes and the 4,000 oil and gas rigs in the Gulf, warns two Texas A&M University oceanographers.

William Bryant and Neil Slowey, professors of oceanography who have more than 90 years of combined research experience in all of the Earth’s oceans, along with fellow researcher Mike Kemp of Washington, D.C., say millions of pounds of bombs are scattered over the Gulf of Mexico and also off the coasts of at least 16 states, from New Jersey to Hawaii.

Bryant says the discarded bombs are hardly a secret. “This has been well known for decades by many people in marine science and oceanography,” he explains.

He will give a presentation in San Juan, Puerto Rico Monday (Oct. 1) about the bombs to a group of oceanographers and marine scientists in a conference titled “International Dialogue on Underwater Munitions.”

“This subject has been very well documented through the years,” Bryant explains. “My first thought when I saw the news reports of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf two years ago were, ‘Oh my gosh, I wonder if some of the bombs down there are to blame.’”

Military dumping of unused bombs into the Gulf and other sites started in 1946 and continued until 1970, when it was finally banned.

Millions of pounds – no one, including the military, knows how many – were sent to the ocean floor as numerous bases tried to lessen the amount of ordnance at their respective locations.

“The best guess is that at least 31 million pounds of bombs were dumped, but that could be a very conservative estimate,” Bryant notes.

“And these were all kinds of bombs, from land mines to the standard military bombs, also several types of chemical weapons. Our military also dumped bombs offshore that they got from Nazi Germany right after World War II. No one seems to know where all of them are and what condition they are in today.”

Photos show that some of the chemical weapons canisters, such as those that carried mustard gas, appear to be leaking materials and are damaged.

“Is there an environmental risk? We don’t know, and that in itself is reason to worry,” explains Bryant. “We just don’t know much at all about these bombs, and it’s been 40 to 60 years that they’ve been down there.”

With the ship traffic needed to support the 4,000 energy rigs, not to mention commercial fishing, cruise lines and other activities, the Gulf can be a sort of marine interstate highway system of its own. There are an estimated 30,000 workers on the oil and gas rigs at any given moment.

The bombs are no stranger to Bryant and Slowey, who have come across them numerous times while conducting various research projects in the Gulf, and they have photographed many of them sitting on the Gulf floor like so many bowling pins, some in areas cleared for oil and gas platform installation.

“We surveyed some of them on trips to the Gulf within the past few years,” he notes. “Ten are about 60 miles out and others are about 100 miles out. The next closest dump site to Texas is in Louisiana, not far from where the Mississippi River delta area is in the Gulf. Some shrimpers have recovered bombs and drums of mustard gas in their fishing nets.”

Bombs used in the military in the 1940s through the 1970s ranged from 250- to 500- and even 1,000-pound explosives, some of them the size of file cabinets. The military has a term for such unused bombs: UXO, or unexploded ordnance.

“Record keeping of these dump sites seems to be sketchy and incomplete at best. Even the military people don’t know where all of them are, and if they don’t know, that means no one really knows,” Bryant adds. He believes that some munitions were “short dumped,” meaning they were discarded outside designated dumping areas.

The subject of the disposal of munitions at sea has been discussed at several offshore technology conferences in recent years, and it was a topic at an international conference several years ago in Poland, Bryant says.

“The bottom line is that these bombs are a threat today and no one knows how to deal with the situation,” Bryant says. “If chemical agents are leaking from some of them, that’s a real problem. If many of them are still capable of exploding, that’s another big problem.

“There is a real need to research the locations of these bombs and to determine if any are leaking materials that could be harmful to marine life and humans,” Bryant says.

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Media contact: Keith Randall, News & Information Services, at (979) 845-4644 or William Bryant at (979) 845-2680

September 27, 2012

U.S. Deserts Can Reveal Past Climate Change Clues

The deserts of Utah and Nevada have not always been dry. Between 14,000 and 20,000 years ago, when large ice caps covered Canada during the last glacial cooling, valleys throughout the desert southwest filled with water to become large lakes, scientists have long surmised. At their maximum size, the desert lakes covered about a quarter of both Nevada and Utah. Now a team led by a Texas A&M University researcher has found a new water cycle connection between the U.S. southwest and the tropics, and understanding the processes that have brought precipitation to the western U.S. will help scientists better understand how the water cycle might be perturbed in the future.

Mitch Lyle, professor of oceanography, led the study with colleagues from Columbia University, University of California-Santa Cruz, Stanford University, Hokkaido University of Japan, Brown University and the U.S. Geological Survey. Their work, funded by the National Science Foundation, is published in the current issue of Science magazine.

The dry shorelines of these glacial lakes were first discovered by 19^th century geologists when the west was first explored, Lyle explains, adding that the source of the additional water has been a mystery. By assembling data from ocean sediments and from dry western valleys collected over the last 30 years, Lyle and the team found a new water cycle connection between the southwest U.S. and the tropics.

“Large ice caps profoundly altered where storms went during glacial periods. Before this study, it was assumed that Pacific winter storms that now track into Washington and Canada were pushed south into central and southern California,” Lyle notes.

“However, by comparing timing between wet intervals on the coast, where these storms would first strike, with growth of the inland lakes, we found that they didn’t match.”

The team was able to time wet periods along the California coast from pollen buried in marine sediments from cores archived by scientists at the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program at Texas A&M. They evaluated lake level studies from southeast Oregon, Nevada, Utah, eastern California, New Mexico, and west Texas to find when lakes filled in different parts of the west.

“Many teams of scientists have been working on this problem since the 1950s, when radiocarbon dating first allowed ages to be put on old shorelines,” Lyle adds. “The data we synthesized covers a wide latitude so that we could determine how the glacial wet intervals operated.”

Only southern California coastal wet intervals matched with the progression of high lakes inland, pointing to the development of a tropical connection, where storms cycled into the region from the tropical Pacific, west of southern Mexico.

“We think that the extra precipitation may have come in summer, enhancing the now weak summer monsoon in the desert southwest. But we need more information about what season the storms arrived to strengthen this speculation,” Lyle says.

Not only is the development of the glacial lakes important from a paleoclimate perspective, but it is likely that the lakes were important to the migration of people into North America, Lyle believes.

Many of the archaeological sites where early Indians settled when they first came into the U.S. are rock shelters at the edges of these ancient lakes. The lakes were a major source of fish, and a gathering place for deer and wildfowl at that time.

“What we need to do now is look at all of this on a finer scale,” Lyle points out. “We need to understand better the processes that directed the storms thousands of years ago, and to predict better what changes might occur in the future.”

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About Research at Texas A&M University: As one of the world’s leading research institutions, Texas A&M is in the vanguard in making significant contributions to the storehouse of knowledge, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represents an annual investment of more than $700 million. That research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state, nation and world.

Media contact: Keith Randall, News & Information Services, at (979) 845-4644 or Mitch Lyle at (979) 845-3380

August 23, 2012

Good News From The Bad Drought: Gulf ‘Dead Zone’ Smallest In Years

The worst drought to hit the United States in at least 50 years does have one benefit: it has created the smallest “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico in years, says a Texas A&M University researcher who has just returned from gulf waters.

Oceanography professor Steve DiMarco, one of the world’s leading authorities on the dead zone, says he and other Texas A&M researchers and graduate students analyzed the Gulf Aug. 15-21 and covered more than 1,200 miles of cruise track, from Texas to Louisiana. The team found no hypoxia off the Texas coast while only finding hypoxia near the Mississippi River delta on the Louisiana coast.

“We had to really hunt to find any hypoxia at all and Texas had none,” he explains.

“The most severe hypoxia levels were found near Terrabonne Bay and Barataria Bay off the coast of southeast Louisiana.

“In all, we found about 1,580 square miles of hypoxia compared to about 3,400 square miles in August 2011. What has happened is that the drought has caused very little fresh-water runoff and nutrient load into the Gulf, and that means a smaller region for marine life to be impacted.”

DiMarco has made 27 research trips to investigate the dead zone since 2003.

DiMarco says the size of the dead zone off coastal Louisiana has been routinely monitored for about 25 years. Previous research has also shown that nitrogen levels in the Gulf related to human activities have tripled over the past 50 years. During the past five years, the dead zone has averaged about 5,700 square miles and has reached as high as 9,400 square miles.

Hypoxia is when oxygen levels in seawater drop to dangerously low levels, defined as concentrations less than 2 milligrams per liter, and persistent hypoxia can potentially result in fish kills and harm marine life, thereby creating a “dead zone” of life in that particular area.

The Mississippi is the largest river in the United States, draining 40 percent of the land area of the country. It also accounts for almost 90 percent of the freshwater runoff into the Gulf of Mexico.

“These findings confirm what we found in a trip to the Gulf back in June, and also what other researchers in Louisiana have discovered, so there is general agreement that the dead zone this year is a very, very small one.

“But the situation could certainly change by next spring,” DiMarco adds.

“The changes we see year to year are extreme. For example, last year, record flooding of the Mississippi River and westerly winds in the Gulf led to a much larger hypoxic area, particularly earlier in the summer. We’ll just have to wait and see what kind of rainfall is in store for the Midwest over the next 8-10 months.”

Participating at sea with DiMarco were Piers Chapman and Matthew Howard of the Department of Oceanography, Chris Shank of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, TAMU graduate students: Ruth Mullins Perry, Emma Cochran, Laura Harred, Allyson Burgess Lucchese (Texas A&M-Galveston), and Marine Technicians Andrew Dancer and Eddie Webb and Alex and Tyler Mifflin of the Canadian TV show the Water Brothers.

On-shore participants included Lisa Campbell, Wilf Gardner and Mary Jo Richardson (oceanography), Antonietta Quigg (Texas A&M-Galveston) and Ethan Grossman (geology and geophysics).

The project was funded by NOAA’s Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research.

For more about hypoxia, go to:

Texas A&M University, Department of Oceanography, project website

NOAA Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Watch

NOAA Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research

LUMCON, Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON)

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About Research at Texas A&M University: As one of the world’s leading research institutions, Texas A&M is in the vanguard in making significant contributions to the storehouse of knowledge, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represents an annual investment of more than $700 million. That research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state, nation and world.

Media contact: Keith Randall, News & Information Services, at (979) 845-4644 or keith-randall@tamu.edu or Steve DiMarco at (979) 862-4168