UGA researcher to tell Congress about oil plumes

By Jeffry Scott

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

ATHENS – A University of Georgia marine scientist plans to tell a congressional subcommittee Wednesday that it’s still impossible to estimate the damage from a BP well that continues to gush oil a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

Samantha Joye said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she will emphasize to Congress how important it is to find out exactly how much oil is pouring into the gulf, a figure that is still unclear seven weeks after the spill began.

“Frankly, I don’t want BP’s number. I want an independent estimate because I think BP has financial incentives for not saying exactly how much oil is spilling into the gulf,” said Joye, a researcher based out of UGA's marine sciences lab who has coordinated the work done from boats in the gulf over the past six weeks by scientists from several universities and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Joye's team three weeks ago reported finding huge plumes of oil two-thirds of a mile beneath the surface of the gulf. Joye says the plumes are as long as 15 miles, as wide as three miles, and, from top to bottom, 600 feet thick.

NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco said Tuesday that tests have confirmed plumes of oil in low concentrations as far as 3,300 feet below the surface and more than 40 miles northeast of the well site.

Since her team's announcement, Joye has become the face of scientists trying to get to the bottom of the spill as BP continues efforts to plug or slow the flow from the Deepwater Horizon well.

She has appeared on "Good Morning America," CNN and "The ABC Evening News," and she has given interviews to the BBC and NPR and dozens of newspapers, magazines and Web sites, talking about the gulf's ecosystem, which she has studied as a biogeochemist for 15 years.

For the past two weeks Joye has been on a boat in the gulf taking water samples as close as a quarter of a mile from the well. She said oxygen levels of the water have been depleted by methane gas and the saturation of the oil.

Joye will appear Wednesday morning before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment in Washington along with witnesses from the U.S. Coast Guard, NOAA and others.

Joye told reporters and an audience at a Tuesday morning news conference at UGA that BP had been “very cooperative” in letting the researchers take samples as close to the well as is safe. But she said the researchers were frustrated that so far the company has not revealed the chemical makeup of dispersants it is putting in the oil to keep it from washing ashore.

“Since we don’t know what’s in the dispersants, it's difficult to find out how much is in the water samples,” said Joye, who has 200 1-liter bottles of oily gulf water in her UGA lab still awaiting analysis. The vast majority of the samples were taken from more than 3,000 feet below the surface and contain readily identifiable oil, she said.

Other jars in her office contain oil collected on the surface. “It’s really weird-looking stuff, orange, in long strings,” she said of the oil evidently treated with dispersants. “When you put it in a jar, about two days later it turns gray and sinks to the bottom.”

She said she doesn’t know whether that’s happening in the gulf. She said at the news conference that researchers cannot predict which way the plumes will move or how fast. "But they’re already in the loop current,” which sweeps along the upper Gulf Coast, where oil blobs and slicks have started washing ashore, she said.

She told the AJC that scientists have also discovered an “eddy” of oil that “has either broken off or is about to break off” from the main spill and is headed for the Dry Tortugas, a group of islands about 70 miles west of Key West, Fla.

“I can’t say when it will get there,” she said. “Days, weeks? I don’t know.”

Joye's greatest fear is hurricane season and how that would churn the gulf, bring that deep water oil to the surface, and push the surface oil ashore, far beyond the capabilities of work crews to corral it and disperse it with chemicals.

“God forbid if we had something like Katrina,” she said.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.