Oceana & Greenpeace Send Research Ships to the Gulf

GULFPORT, MS. -- Mike Hirshfield, the chief scientist aboard the ship Oceana Latitude, is a lean, white-bearded man with keen brown eyes. Currently, those eyes are trained on the Gulf of Mexico as he and a crew of 12 scientists conduct independent research on the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

“We’ve never had a circumstance where so much oil has come up from so deep,” he said during the launching party for the boat’s research mission to the gulf. “Nobody knows what we are going to find.”

During their mission, the Oceana crew is sampling and mapping subsurface oil, as well as using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to explore seafloor habitat areas as much as 3,200 feet below the surface that may have been harmed by underwater oil.

The Oceana crew isn’t the only one conducting independent research into the effects of the spill. Myriad academics, environmentalists and grassroots activists have been collecting data from water samples to video footage. And the environmental organization Greenpeace also has sent their 165-foot-long icebreaker, the Arctic Sunrise, on a three-month expedition to the area.

“Nobody is going to find it all out,” Hirshfield said. “All of us are trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle, and we’re happy to contribute any piece we can.”

Many, from activists to fishermen, welcome independent research and are openly skeptical of official reports from both BP and the government.

“Since the spill first began we’ve been frustrated by the amount of spin on the scope of the spill and the impacts that it has caused,” said Greenpeace oceans campaign director John Hocevar, who is managing the Arctic Sunrise’s gulf research program.

“The most recent example of this troubling trend is the report that the National Incident Command put out last month – where basically they said its all fine, mission accomplished, we can go home, big success,” he added.

That scientific controversy hinged on a federal report that 75 percent of the spilled oil was gone. The results were widely questioned, and a subsequent independent report by the University of Georgia contended that 79 percent of the spilled oil remained in the ecosystem.

“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” Charles Hopkinson, director of the Georgia Sea Grant and professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia, said in a press release. “The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade. We are still far from a complete understanding of what its impacts are.”

And this is why the more eyes on the problem, the better, according to Hirshfield and Hocevar.

Three Dimensional Map

The Oceana Latitude is presently circling the site of the spill, where the crew has deployed hundreds of oil sensors designed to detect subsurface oil plumes.

The sensors are suspended from buoys that were placed along a series of transects surrounding the spill site. Each buoy dangles a cable, and the sensors are placed on that cable at 100-foot intervals so that they are likely to detect oil at any depth that it may occur. Beginning in the next few days, the sensors will be retrieved and sent to a laboratory for analysis.

“We hope to get a three-dimensional map,” Hirshfield said. “These little plastic strips are very sensitive.”

Other aspects of the Latitude’s mission are less rigorously scientific, Hirshfield notes.

“We’re not a university, and this isn’t a full-on research vessel,” he said while standing in the plushy white-carpeted, wood-paneled main room of the ship that was donated to the organization. “There was also the practical consideration of thinking of the kinds of things that we could put together quickly.”

Throughout their expedition, the Latitude crew will work in collaboration with several different universities and researchers in efforts to observe and tag a variety of shark species including tiger, hammerhead, and whale sharks, according to campaign manager Dustin Cranor.