Researchers Push the Boundaries of Precision at NIST

Outside Washington, D.C., just a stone’s throw up the road in Gaithersburg, Md., lies the sprawling 580-acre headquarters of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an unheralded government agency that has played a part in some of the biggest advances in science, manufacturing and communications in the last century.

To be precise, the front gate of the institute’s wooded, rural campus is exactly 20.664 miles from the center of the U.S. Capitol Building. It’s worth mentioning, because NIST is in the business of precision: everything the institute does revolves around standards, measurements and comparisons, all reliant on a meticulous attention to detail. Since it was established in 1901, the agency has worked to promote U.S. innovation and industry by developing tools that help speed up research, ensure the reliability of manufactured goods, and improve our quality of life.

Everything from the recipe for steel used in automobile production to earthquake safety standards for buildings to the nation’s official atomic clock stemmed from the efforts of NIST researchers.

The institute’s bucolic setting — complete with wildlife like deer and foxes — belies a modern core of state-of-the-art facilities like the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology. This massive concrete, steel and glass building houses laboratories isolated as much as 40 feet underground, tightly temperature- and humitity-controlled so as not to perturb the exquisitely sensitive experiments conducted there.

It’s in this pantheon of precision that researchers Gordon Shaw and Jon Pratt are working to develop new standards for measuring extremely tiny forces, all the way down at the molecular level. The centerpiece of their Small Force Metrology Lab is the atomic force microscope, a phenomenally sensitive instrument that can create an ultra-high resolution image by dragging a silicon strip tipped with a diamond point (much like a phonograph needle) back and forth over a surface, and measuring the force exerted on the silicon strip as it bends and flexes with the contours of the surface.

What Shaw and Pratt are looking for is a new way for scientists using atomic force microscopes around the world to cheaply and efficiently calibrate their machines. Their current research is exploring the hypothesis that tiny snippets of DNA could be used as a “standard reference material” for just such a purpose.

Shaw, a stocky, enthusiastic man with a ready smile and long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, explained the concept in the cramped atomic force microscope control room. DNA, he said, has some basic characteristics that make it appealing as a reference material: it’s cheap to produce, it can be replicated identically every time, and it appears to break when stretched with a predictable amount of force.

“Anyone can really make this DNA molecule,” Shaw said. “Our goal is to come up with a recipe that people can repeat anywhere in the world and get the same force.”

To test this idea, Shaw places under the microscope DNA that has been specially treated so one end of each strand sticks to the surface being scanned, while the other is attracted to the tip of the silicon probe. Then, he goes fishing. When the probe has snagged the loose end of a DNA molecule, the researchers gradually pull on it until it comes apart, then record the force at which it broke.

With any luck, their research will be a success, and before long yet another NIST recipe for precision will be circulating the globe, helping spur scientists and entrepreneurs to break new ground and push the boundaries of technology ever further forward.

At NIST, the Future of Healthcare Technology Rapidly Approaches

Imagine this: out of the blue one day, you begin to feel nauseated and achy. As your body temperature soars, you smartly head to the hospital, where you are greeted by the usual intake procedure. Once you get to the exam room, though, something unfamiliar happens. Instead of collecting a few milliliters of blood into a series of test tubes which are carefully labeled and sent off to a lab that will analyze the samples and return with a complete analysis in a matter of hours, the nurse removes a few microliters -- just a couple drops, really -- of blood and ejects them onto a thin, credit card-sized chip. Within minutes, the doctor is explaining to you the bacterial infection that is at the root of your symptoms and is handing you a prescription for antibiotics.

Thanks to researchers like Dr. Samuel Stavis, this sci-fi-sounding scenario may one day be a reality. Stavis is a physical scientist in the Semiconductor Electronics Division of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), which sounds like a field pretty far removed from making bedside lab test equipment. But Stavis' expertise in nanofluidics, the study of fluids on a tiny, tiny, scale (think fractions of a drop of liquid), and nanofabrication make him aptly positioned for developing this kind of technology. His lab at NIST's Gaithersburg, MD, headquarters looks similar to the kind he may one day make obsolete: a large Zeiss microscope setup takes center stage, surrounded by various computers and intimidating apparatuses of chrome and every color of wire. Stavis himself appears equally sophisticated; his gelled blond hair, thin metal eyeglasses, and sharp dress make him appear more like a Scandanavian businessman than a scientist, but once he begins to energetically describe his work, his engineering prowess becomes clear.

He explains that the current process of sorting nanoparticles of different sizes is a lengthy and expensive one, as it relies on costly machines like electron microscopes and laborious techniques like chromatography. "The methods we have now for separating and characterizing nanoparticles are slowing down the whole field," he says.

His solution: integrate the separation process into a single nanofluidic device. His idea came to fruition in early 2009, when he published an article describing the successful creation of a nanofluidic device with a complex 3-D structure, the first of its kind in the world. The device is a chamber with a stair-step structure, a significant departure from the traditional flat channels of this equipment, and it is this unique structure that enables the device to separate nanoparticles ranging from 10 to 620 nanometers (approximately 1% the thickness of a strand of human hair, which is around 60,000 nanometers in diameter). Like a coin sorter on a scale a million times smaller, the device traps particles at certain points along the chamber based on their size. Once particles are separated, identifying and characterizing them becomes a much simpler process.

Stavis hopes that this device will put scientists closer to achieving the so-called lab-on-a-chip technology, a method by which processes and analyses that used to depend on entire labs' worth of equipment can be performed on a chip the size of a stick of gum.

The applications of this lab-on-a-chip technology are extensive, like in criminology where it could be used for instant DNA-matching analysis (which would be particularly helpful in light of recent revelations about the massive FBI backlog of DNA cases), but the field where it could make the biggest difference is healthcare. Doctors will be able to detect bacteria, viruses, and even cancer almost instantly. Besides making analyses much faster and cheaper to perform, the mobility of this technology makes it ideal for responding to large-scale medical disasters like the recent earthquake in Haiti. It could also be especially helpful in countries with poor healthcare infrastructure, where clinics often have the proper drugs to treat infectious diseases, but lack the diagnostic tools to determine who needs treatment.

For now, these bedside lab tests remain in the realm of fiction. But with groundbreaking work and innovative thinking like Stavis's, this future may be closer than it appears.

Researchers Create Measurement Standards from Nature

The doors on the oversized freight elevator slam shut. We slowly descend until we are forty feet below the surface of the earth. The doors open and we file out of the elevator into a long, artificially lit stretch of hall. We have reached the depths of Building 219 on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where every aspect of the local environment – temperature, humidity, lighting, etc. – is strictly controlled.

“The researchers fight to work here,” mechanical engineer Jon Pratt remarks as we walk down the pristine hallway. Pratt and research chemist Gordon Shaw are creating reliable and accurate intrinsic (based on nature) reference standards as part of the Mass and Force Group of NIST’s Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory.

Shaw leads us to a room housing an atomic force microscope (AFM). We pass through one door, walk a few feet, and then pass through another door. This double isolation system helps keep the vibrations in the microscope room to a minimum and the temperature at 20 degrees Celsius plus or minus two-hundredths of a degree. Humidity is maintained at 30 percent plus or minus 1 percent. Not a bad place to work, especially during one of the hottest summers on record in the Washington, DC area.

Light is piped into the room along the ceiling so that no one light bulb creates a hot spot. “Thermogradients are the enemy,” Shaw says. “Even small temperature changes can cause the measurement system to be unstable enough that it won’t be able to measure what you’re interested in.”

With an AFM, you can view objects over 1,000 times smaller than with conventional light microscopy. The AFM uses a cantilever system to characterize materials at the atomic and molecular levels. A cantilever resembles a miniature diving board with a sharp silicone tip.

“As you bring the tip close to the surface, it may start to bend toward the surface because of the electrostatic force interactions with the surface,” Shaw notes.

The cantilever tip moves slowly back and forth across the surface of the sample. We look in amazement as the monitor starts to display a pattern that resembles an intertwined assortment of twigs. Shaw notes that the AFM is imaging collagen fibers. Collagen – the most abundant protein in mammals – is found in tendons, ligaments, skin, cartilage, and bone, among other tissues.

Shaw tells us that he would have preferred to image DNA this evening, but he acknowledges that it is rather “tricky” to do so.

Tricky, but not impossible. Actually, Shaw and Pratt have successfully used the AFM to measure the mechanical properties of a single DNA molecule so that it can serve as an intrinsic reference standard for force.

DNA normally forms random coils in solution. In a typical experiment, Shaw and Pratt would move the cantilever around, hunting for the DNA in a solution. They would coat the tip of the cantilever with a chemical that specifically binds to a substance found at one end of a DNA molecule. Eventually, they would get a molecule of DNA attached to the tip of the cantilever. The researchers would then begin to stretch the DNA molecule. At a certain point, typically at a force of approximately 65 piconewtons, the DNA molecule would stretch for a long distance with very little extra applied force.

“Some of the base pairs in the DNA are starting to come apart,” Shaw says. “You have a partial melting of the double helix at that point. That happens as far as we can tell at a fairly well-defined force.”

As Shaw and Pratt and another NIST colleague, Douglas Smith, note in a recent article published in the Proceedings of the SEM Annual Conference, a DNA molecule can therefore be used as a “force reference that will allow the calibration of a wide variety of force measuring instruments such as optical, magnetic, and dielectrophoretic tweezers.”

And thanks to modern polymerase chain reaction (PCR) methods, the same DNA molecule can be made over and over again. “In an afternoon’s work you can make enough to give everyone on the planet 5,000 force references,” Shaw notes as we exit through the double-door climate and vibration control system.

The freight elevator slowly rises to ground level. The doors open and natural light filters in through the first-floor windows. We have returned to a “normal” hallway, where a simple thermostat keeps the temperature at a comfortable level and rooms have just one door.

Still, I tread lightly as I walk down the hall.

Nano-sized Lab Sorts Particles On the Run

The sunglasses you are wear, the vitamin you took with your breakfast, the cell phone in your pocket may all have one thing in common--a component or part built with nanotechnology. The science of materials produced from the atom up at the nanoscale has exploded over the past two decades. But the pace of this infusion may get even faster thanks to a new measurement concept developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Cornell University.

Nanotechnology is being used to make all kinds of new and improved products, fortify manufacturing processes and even change long standing medical procedures. The list of applications for the science that builds on the unique qualities of nanoparticles is growing every day. You might not think from the way nanotechnology has infiltrated our lives that there is a challenge to living lives full of nano. But in fact, the complex and expensive processes needed to measure and describe particles – the building blocks of the technology – is slowing down the rate at which new applications can land in hands of consumers, patients and users.

The size of the nanoparticle matters significantly. For every one, its size and shape determines its properties, utility and even perhaps its safety. The conventional methods for measuring these particles can be slow. But that may change in the next few years because of a new concept just proved by a team led by Sam Stavis, Ph.D. from NIST. The technique integrates the process on a “lab on a chip.” It has potential to accelerate advances in biology, medicine, engineering, physics and materials science, all fields that use nanotechnology.

The foundation for the Dr. Stavis’s new nanoscale lab is a 4-inch wafer of glass. Using similar techniques to the ones used by the semiconductor industry to “paint on” circuitry, Stavis uses a process called grayscale photolithography to build a 3-D structure on the chip. First a layer of light sensitive chemical called “photoresist” is spread across the chip. With a a precisely calibrated “stencil”, light hits the photoresist and channels of varying widths are created across the wafer. The whole structure of 20 channels is shaped like a staircase and the channels range in size form 10 nanometers to 650 nanometers.

With another wafer placed on top, the channels-on-a-chip have become a chamber-on-a -chip. Stavis injects a solution with different size nanoparticles. Inside the chamber, the particles are pushed across the channel by an electric charge. As each particle hits a stair that matches it in diameter it falls into the corresponding channel. One after the other, nanoparticles drop into the right channel like coins in a change-sorting machine. The particles have been dyed with fluorescent paint so the team can photograph them with an electron microscope. The photo arrays the particles along a scale the channel rows are set to collect the particles that can only be seen under an electron microscope.

“You can mass produce and give people references better than the electron microscope and chromatography,” said Stavis. While the new lab-on-a-chip won’t replace these tools, this nanoscale tool for nanoparticles has potential for speed, flexibility, and portability without sacrificing accuracy achieved with the conventional tools.

The Secret in the Suburbs

These folks know all about you. They know how much your Fruit-of-the-Looms weigh and how much vitamin C is really in your Centrum. They know the size of your Michelins and how much air they’d better hold to keep you rolling, and they know that a .38 slug will leave a dent the size of an orange in your Kevlar vest. They know whether your dentist’s autoclave reaches the temperature needed to sterilize the drill, and whether her latex gloves will tear as she’s stretching her fingers toward your molars. If it’s your business, it’s their business.

They are the people who labor at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology. Their business is metrology, the science of measurement. According to Gail Porter it’s a business as old as, well, business. And you haven’t heard of it, because NIST, like any enterprise, keeps its valuables under lock and key, deep in unassuming Gaithersburg, Maryland, a dozen miles north of Washington DC.

Porter is NIST’s Public Affairs Director, which means she’s in charge of leading tours through the facility. We are eight adult writing students, tired after a humid summer workday. Porter is an energetic woman, dressed head to toe in business brown. She greets us at dusk, with a van in a parking lot outside the facility. After we pile in, she drives us past the guarded gatehouse and winds through a five hundred acre parkland.

The forests and lawns are home to deer, foxes—and laboratories buried forty feet below ground. “To minimize vibration,” Porter explains. And there are to be no perturbations in our schedule, either. She has arranged for us to tour the museum, visit three labs, and listen to three lectures, all in exactly 90 minutes.

We disembark at an exhibit hall and Porter herds us inside. She strides down the waxed linoleum with elbows pumping, while we struggle to follow. We think we have come to learn about nanotechnology, but we gape at smashed cars and lists of peanut butter ingredients. Porter is careful to point out that NIST developed expressly to serve commerce. It’s because of NIST that buying peanut butter is something shoppers can do with confidence. A jar of Skippy’s weighs a pound and holds a pint of a standardized mixture of peanuts, salt, fat and sweetener that can be called peanut butter. But how do you measure—and sell—something as small as a molecule? That question is what made NIST scientists turn their attention to nanotechnology.

Our next stop is “Building 216.” There, in an underground laboratory, Jon Pratt has assembled an instrument he calls “an electrostatic force balance.” Pratt has close-cropped silver hair, but looks boyish in skinny jeans. Porter reminds him that we have two lectures after his, so he speaks quickly, explaining that mass is not the same as weight, but more fundamental. Weight depends on gravity, but gravity is not constant throughout the universe. For example, we weigh more on earth than we would on the moon, but we still have the same mass. Pratt moves on to his electrostatic force balance—a scale—used to measure the mass of extremely tiny objects, say strands of DNA. Instead of using gravity to measure mass, Pratt’s scale uses the intrinsic electrostatic forces surrounding an object, even one as small as a molecule.

Nested in a ceiling-high cylinder of gleaming brushed steel, Pratt’s instrument is actually a probe shaped like a diving board, with a point one atom in diameter. The object to be “weighed” is moved toward the probe, and as it approaches, the object’s electrostatic field bends the probe up or down. The more massive the object, the bigger the deflection.

But that lecture is over, and we are handed off to Gordon Shaw. Shaw, also in jeans, is younger and stockier than Pratt. With enthusiastic hand motions, he explains that Pratt’s instrument allows him to measure the force required to rupture a strand of DNA (a standardized strand, of course).

Shaw leads us down an endless hall to his temperature-controlled laboratory. We crowd into a room slightly larger than a closet, and Shaw points to a work station. There, on a computer monitor, we see Pratt’s tiny diving board at work, dutifully deflecting before strands of protein. Shaw apologizes for not showing us strands of DNA. Someone tries to deflect the apology by saying that to us, protein or DNA, it’s all the same. Shaw’s voice drops. Not protein, he says, but DNA, will one day be the industry standard for measuring force on the molecular level.


But Porter has come to collect us and take us to our final stop, the laboratory of Samuel Stavis. Three years out of his PhD program, Stavis has neatly-cropped hair and Ivy League confidence. He ushers us into the small floor space separating his sprawling stereoscopic microscope from a counter that holds a dish labeled “Fragile.” His job, says Stavis, is to order a varied mixture of nanoparticles by size. To do this, he builds tiny tapering chutes, then forces nanoparticles into the chute. The nanoparticles travel down the narrowing chute and stop when their diameter equals that of the chute. Large particles stop sooner than small particles. It is a simple idea, and it strikes us as ingenius.
There are still some problems to work out, says Stavis, like how to separate the various particles once they’re stopped. But Stavis has published a paper on the topic, and the biomedical industry is reading it.

Tours are not available for the general public. But Nist does not consider students, industry groups, scouts, consumer groups, non-profits, and so on "the general public". So if you can talk Gail Porter into believing you’re not a member of the general public, a tour is well worth your time.

http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/

Stretching it out: Nano-force standard relies on DNA’s breaking point

Dr. Gordon Shaw squats down over the shiny linoleum floor, holding one end of a length of string in his hand. He grabs the middle of the string with his other hand and begins swirling his arms around, tracing random parabolas through the air with the string.

Shaw isn’t performing a magic trick, rather, he’s simulating how a single molecule of DNA behaves in solution. He and his colleagues have devised a way to carefully measure the force required to straighten out such a DNA molecule and stretch it beyond its breaking point, giving them the most precise standard to date for measuring forces at the nanoscale.

Shaw is a research scientist in the Advanced Measurement Lab at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. For the last six years, he has been spending most of his waking hours figuring out new ways to accurately measure impossibly small masses, forces and distances.

His latest project is developing an intrinsic force measurement for things happening at the atomic scale--the individual molecules that make up everything from the cells in our bodies to the building blocks of metal alloys. Shaw’s experiments will provide a standard that could help scientists better understand, for example, the forces involved in protein folding that lead to the formation of plaques in Alzheimer’s disease or the differences in cell stiffness that distinguish healthy cells from cancerous cells.

“Proteins are like little machines,” said Shaw. “They fold and twist and perform different functions based on how they behave mechanically.”

In order to assess those differences, you need a measurement device that can distinguish between the forces that hold one protein in position versus another. You also need a way to calibrate your measurement device to make sure that what your measuring corresponds to accepted and verified scientific standards.

Shaw and his colleagues have recently developed a method of measuring nano-scale forces based on the intrinsic strength of bonds that hold DNA molecules together. In its natural state, DNA floats freely in a coiled double-helix shape like a noodle in a pot of boiling spaghetti. Using techniques developed at NIST, Shaw has found a way to grab one end of the DNA strand and gently pull it taut like a string. At first, the strand of DNA will simply straighten out with virtually no force applied at all. But eventually, with tiny, increasing amounts of force, the individual base pairs start to rip apart. Base pairs will then continue to break apart with almost no additional force applied until the double helix completely unravels. It is this point, the so called intrinsic force plateau, that serves as a reference point for future nanotechnologies. This particular strain of DNA’s breaking point happens to occur at exactly 65 piconewtons.

“It has this well defined force signature,” Shaw said. “We can calibrate it once, replicate DNA molecule trillions of time, and it will be exactly the same.”

In addition to having an extremely consistent breaking point, these specially designed DNA molecules can also be produced on the cheap. According to Shaw, just $20 of raw material can be transformed into 5000 reference samples for every person on the planet in just a few hours.

Using a synthesized DNA molecule also has the benefit of being flexible enough to work in a number of settings. A major concern with investing so much time and effort into developing a reference standard is that it will immediately become obsolete. So rather than designing a specific sensor technology, they developed a reference standard that works almost anywhere.

“That’s why we thought it would be good to calibrate to a DNA molecule,” said Shaw. “It can be used in multiple platforms and technologies.”

Shaw’s next challenge is to figure out how to reduce the uncertainty of his reference standard calibration. Currently, his measurements are picking up about a piconewton of noise--a force equal to one trillionth the weight of a small apple--which contributes to an overall uncertainty of five percent. They’d like to drive that number down by reducing the amount of noise they pick up in their measurements.

But for now, he can revel in the glory of having developed the smallest reliable measure of force known to man. Because with so many rapid advances in the field of nanotechnology, one thing is certain: the standard won’t last for long.

Setting the standard for subatomic forces

Everyday language makes plenty of references to “force” – a person with a strong personality is a ‘force of nature,’ or we worry about unseen ‘forces of evil.’ But the physics version came before all those figures of speech – force as a push or pull that changes the motion of an object. Accurate evaluation of physical force matters constantly in every day life – a car moves forward when its bulk is propelled by gas being burned in a combustion engine, or an arm thrusts a ball forward to the first baseman or wide receiver. The car only works if all its component parts, made in many different places, fit together properly, and if its chosen engine generates enough – you guessed it – force to move the assembled body.

So, how do people compare forces? Way back in high school science, you might have heard of Newton’s Second Law. The simple mathematical description of physical force boils down to a famous formula, in which Force = Mass multiplied by Acceleration. By convention, the unit of measurement of force is now the appropriately-named "Newton," which is defined as the force required to accelerate a 1 kilogram mass at a particular rate (1 square meter, to be exact). This standard definition, coupled with known reference materials like that kilogram, allows engineers in the United States to describe amounts of force in ways in the same as engineers in, say, Korea.

Interestingly, the kilogram remains the only international measurement unit that is defined by an arbitrary “artifactual” standard – a hunk of metal made in 1889 that resides outside of Paris. All the others, such as length, time, and temperature, are linked to some natural phenomenon that’s the same the world over. For example, the chief unit of time, the second, is linked to properties of cesium atoms, an “intrinsic” standard. The intrinsic approach has obvious advantages, unless you really find it convenient to travel to France every time you need to check the whether your kilogram of car parts is the same as someone else’s. That’s why researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a subdivision of the U.S. federal government’s Department of Commerce in Gaithersburg, MD, are working hard on a new definition for the kilogram (http://www.nist.gov/mel/mmd/mf/rekilo.cfm). And the problems are even harder when the objects involved are on the nanoscale, thousands of times smaller than an engine or a baseball.

Enter NIST researchers Jon Pratt and Gordon Shaw. Dr. Pratt and Dr. Gordon are developing a new and novel means of standardizing the definition of very small forces between atoms (http://www.nist.gov/mel/mmd/mf/sfmet.cfm). Their work, soon to be published in detail, was initially described during Dr. Pratt’s keynote address to the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Society for Experimental Mechanics (see http://www.nist.gov/manuscript-publication-search.cfm?pub_id=905416).

To create a new standard, they’ve studied the behavior of piece of double stranded DNA dissolved in a fluid under defined conditions of temperature and pH. Ordinarily DNA has a loose structure, rather like a woven rope that coils and flops randomly in solution. But the DNA can be anchored to a surface at one end, then picked up and pulled from the other end by a tiny lever in a large instrument designed to measure forces called an atomic force microscope (AFM). This arrangement simultaneously stretches out the DNA rope and measures the force being exerted, when the AFM lever senses resistance. When the pulling action first begins to stretch the DNA, the molecule resists the pull, and increasing force is measured via the AFM’s lever. But then at a certain point, the rope begins to unravel or fray instead of the resistance increasing – and for a fairly long period of more pulling, the force being measured doesn’t change. Eventually, when pulled hard enough and long enough, the rope puts up a last gasp of resistance and very large forces are measured, until the rope breaks apart altogether.

That intermediate zone, in which the force remains constant despite increasing pull, can be taken advantage of to use as a standard means of defining a particular amount of molecular force. “Our goal,” says Dr. Pratt, “is a recipe for people to be able to repeat anywhere in the world and get a known force.” The standard DNA can be made and used by any group anywhere in the world who has access to what are now relatively cheap and common materials and equipment. In fact, Dr. Shaw points out, “In an afternoon’s work you can make enough [DNA] to give everybody on the planet 5000 force references.” And the intrinsic property of that piece of DNA is the same whether stretched by an atomic force microscope in Montreal or in Moscow.

The technical catch is that the properties of the levers used in the atomic force microscope have to also be comparable and known, or “calibrated,” in order to get the same results everywhere. To solve that problem, Dr. Pratt built the world’s first electrostatic force balance (“Five years of my life,” jokes Dr. Pratt), a large and delicate piece of equipment that’s used to calibrate the levers used in atomic force microscopes. A calibrated set of levers can be shipped throughout the world to other reference agencies. Thus, NIST is on the forefront of furthering even more new applications for materials made on the nanoscale, which are now ubiquitous in products as varied as medicines, suntan lotion, and semi-conductors.

9-11 cleanup redux: respirators and shrinks, anyone?

Who’s protecting those valiant humans who are trying to protect us from the Gulf oil spill? Granted, the flora and fauna in the ocean have been the first to get smacked by this miserable environmental disaster. But the humans, particularly those whose occupation is either being part of the response and clean up effort, or close enough to the scene to be wiped out by the spill, deserve attention too. That’s one goal of the bloggers over at the Pump Handle (http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/), cleverly named to honor John Snow’s unpopular insistence on taking the handle off of a public well pump during an 1850’s epidemic of cholera in London in order to finally cut off the infection’s source. So is learning from past mistakes, such as the long term health issues experienced by those in New York who worked on the World Trade Center site.

The blog is managed by Celeste Monforton and Liz Borkowski, both public health professionals in the Department of Environmental Health at George Washington University with academic research interests in occupational health issues (full disclosure: I'm predisposed to like Celeste, whose family rents our beach house every summer). Both are both are frequent critics of OSHA, and indeed most of the blog content doesn’t hesitate to mix information on problems with strong opinions about root causes and culprits.

The blog’s postings continue to cover a variety of topics, but a number of recent entries, mostly from Liz as well as guest blogger Elizabeth Grossman, have centered on the health problems now cropping up among oil spill responders. OSHA’s outdated standards and dubious air sampling data come in for clear criticism. Ms. Grossman explores the relationship between workers’ respiratory and gastrointestinal symptoms (some serious enough for hospitalization), and breathing oil-saturated air or being in proximity to controlled oil burns. Eileen Senn, an experienced industrial hygienist, makes a good case is made for distributing respirators to workers universally, contrasting her analysis with disturbing quotes from official and corporate sources about reasons for not doing so.

The longer term impact on residents’ mental health, particularly given folks in the area have already been beaten up by Katrina, has also gotten good discussion, with plenty of mention about the lack of mental health professionals being on the scene to date. This is the only place I have seen any mention of another sad factor: over a third of Louisiana’s commercial fishermen in the region are Vietnamese, many recent immigrants that send money to families still back in Vietnam and now on the front lines of stress. Overall, the Pump Handle gets kudos for drawing attention to these occupational and public health issues.

A picture of the Gulf from above really can be worth those 1000 words

The truism about pictures versus words is amply illustrated by SkyTruth’s running blog, which provides ongoing wide-angle illustrations of the Gulf Oil Spill. Founded in 2001 by John Amos, a geologist experienced in satellite image processing, image analysis, and digital mapping techniques, SkyTruth (http://www.skytruth.org/index.htm) is now a small non-profit organization interested in applying that technology to environmental issues. Its goal is to shine a bright, and visual, light on the state of the earth. SkyTruth started a blog in 2007 (http://blog.skytruth.org/), but was the effort was relatively sleepy; posts averaged less than 2 per month, on mostly random subjects but occasionally including notes about oil leaks from offshore platforms.

As it happens, Mr. Amos provided expert testimony to the U.S. Senate’s United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in November 2009, focusing on the risks of offshore drilling illustrated by a blowout at a platform off the coast of Australia in 2008 covered 22,000 square miles of ocean with oil in a 10 week stretch. His street cred on the topic was therefore well established by the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew. The day after the explosion, SkyTruth’s blog, usually written by Mr. Amos, started writing and posting dramatic pictures of the resulting fire and oil plumes. In contrast to its earlier slow pace, it has kept up nearly daily postings ever since. The content combines summaries of the day’s events and running commentary (often critical) with excellent photos, various technical analyses of numerical estimates, quantitative comparisons, satellite images, videos, and radar images illustrating the movement of oil and impacts throughout the Gulf region. The images are usually heavily annotated to point out landmarks and patterns, which is usually helpful but occasionally distracting (and hard to evaluate for accuracy), and the text comes with a heavy helping of disdain for just about anyone involved in the response.

Nonetheless, SkyTruth has been credited with being at the forefront of those questioning, and eventually disproving, the low-ball official estimates of the volume of oil gushing out of the ocean floor. Also a worthwhile resource, in mid-May SkyTruth joined with the Ocean Conservancy and the Surfrider Foundation to host an interesting interactive and comprehensive web site, the Gulf Oil Spill Tracker (http://oilspill.skytruth.org/main), as a repository of reports from the public about oil sightings and locations.

The Thrill of Scientific Victory in the Middle of a Defeated Gulf

Marshalling the resources for scientific studies of an event like the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which blew up on April 20, 2010, is usually daunting and time consuming. A credible effort requires, at a minimum, expert personpower, equipment, supplies, and buckets of money. But the unprecedented draw of such a unique opportunity got a fast response from the of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Research Lab. By the end of April, the University assembled a team drawn from experts across its many departments involved in ocean, marine life, and geophysical studies, got funding from NOAA, and put the Research Vessel Pelican on the water to take sediment samples and begin measuring the movement and physical state of the released oil. Dr. Vernon Asper, a professor in the Department of Marine Science at USM and trained marine geology at the University of Hawaii and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, became the voyage’s designated blogger.

That cruise lasted 10 days, and Dr. Asper returned to sea on a second week-long trip at the end of May on the R/V Tommy Munro sponsored by NSF and included a consortium of scientists, notably Dr. Samantha Joye (arguably, the most well-known of those scientists blogging about the oil spill; see http://gulfblog.uga.edu/). Dr. Asper’s observations of the scene at this “Ground Zero,” descriptions of the work, and comments on the results make for a great read. He provides readable if somewhat technical descriptions of the equipment used and the sampling strategies, along with capturing a bit of the flavor of the voyage itself and the people involved. Embedded along with the blog text are great pictures, a video, and a series of audio blog posts from his colleague, Dr. Jim Franks, a researcher in the Department of Fisheries Research and Development.

But what really makes this blog stand out is its sense of gee-whiz excitement about the thrills of being in the middle of real-time scientific discoveries. Many of the samples and data collected will be analyzed back on dry land for years. But in the blog, Dr. Asper’s informal but engaging writing poses the scientific questions being asked right now, captures first reactions to the data, spits out hypotheses, and tosses around options to test the hypotheses. Ultimately, he describes not one but two Eureka moments (“One of the best days in my science career ever”), realizing that their early ideas about the oil forming deep underwater plumes, and the nature of the aggregates that form the plumes, are the right interpretations and real discoveries (which BP dismissed, until public release of some data forced them to concede the points). Along the line, he also enjoys interviews with Katie Couric, a Good Morning America team, and New York Times reporters. The only down side is that the blog does not have options for comments or display of hits received, so it’s not possible to gauge the level of interest it has received. And the entries end on June 1, with the return of the R/V Tommy Munro to port, with no further updates as of June 25. It’s well worth looking for future installments. Check it out at http://www.usm.edu/oilspill/blogs.php.

Deep Sea News Conveys Deep Sadness

Deep Sea News-I hit marine science blog pay dirt! http://deepseanews.com/
Thanks to Southern Fried Scientists, a trio of graduate students who have aggregated an outstanding list of credible oil spill blogs and twitter sites found at http://www.southernfriedscience.com/ I found Deep Sea News.

Hosted by Craig McClain National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, the blog is a finalist in the "Funniest Blog" category for the 2010 Research Blogging Awards given by Seed Media Group. But these awards were made in February before the spill. I doubt that Deep Sea News would be entered in the same category next year.

McClain, or Dr. M as he is identified, launched his blog with the intent to post abstracts of recently published papers. But as he began to add more news, Dr. M realized that his blog could be a channel to deliver deep-sea science to the public. Today’s post offers a link to Scientific American’s story on the “mass murder” (blogger’s characterization) of sea cucumbers near the oil leak site. There are two photos, one aerial in which you can see an expanse of water dotted with floaters and another close up of the sea cucumber. Thousands of these sea-bottom feeding creatures died and floated to the surface of the Gulf. The team of researchers who reported this huge fish kill was actually in the Gulf to measure methane levels, estimate the size of the spill and come up with ways to remove the methane from the water. The Deep Sea News blog cited this story as another of the “ecological disaster manifesting itself.”

The next post for June 22, proclaims that is has been “64 magical days and 160 million gallons (or so) since the Deepwater Horizon smack down,” and then follows with a long list of links to the most arresting stories to “make you feel nauseous.” Reading these recent posts written by scientists who know all too well what is being lost, you are exposed to their feelings as well as their knowledge. They don’t need to express their feelings in sensational terms, the facts they choose to highlight and explain along with random sarcasm convey their discouragement.

Oil Spill Blogs

Gulfblog - http://gulfblog.uga.edu/

This blog is run by Dr. Samantha Joye at the University of Georgia’s Department of Marine Sciences, who is a leading a team of scientists conducting research on the massive underwater oil plume that was discovered in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The first dispatches were sent from aboard the R/V F.G. Walton Smith, where they were collecting data for this NSF-funded project; since they returned from their 2 week cruise, Joye has been updating the blog as the team works on their analysis. Several of the blog posts use a straightforward question-and-answer format as Joye tries to address the many questions that readers have sent in. Many of the questions relate to minutiae or esoteric concepts connected to the oil spill and marine science, indicating that readers are generally either experts in the field or had no knowledge about this stuff before the spill and have just been doing a lot of reading up in the past few weeks (I know several people who would fall into the latter category). Some questions are factual questions or requests for clarification about the scientific elements related to the spill, while others relate more to Joye’s research direction and methods. Still others are inquiries about Joye’s firsthand experience in the area, which I find particularly interesting as there are so many rumors swirling about that it’s hard to get an idea of what’s really going on, and it’s nice to hear from someone who doesn’t seem to have an agenda (well at least not as obvious as the various politicians/oil and gas PR people). While technically sophisticated and often conceptually complex, Joye’s answers are presented in clear, colloquial language and make for an interesting read even to a novice like me. I have remained shamefully ignorant of most of the goings-on in the Gulf (partly out of self-preservation – I get easily overwhelmed by the grimness of it all, and partly because I don’t know who to believe), but Joye’s blog provides one of the most informative and up-close accounts of what’s going on in the Gulf that I’ve come across. The blog is chock full of photos and links to various websites and news stories relating to the UGA research and the oil spill in general. Two thumbs up!

The Recovery Room - http://blogs.nature.com/NicoleRE/

This blog is written by Nicole Edmison, a conservation and nature biologist who was stationed near Venice, Louisiana, working with the Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research organization until early this month. In the “About” section of the blog, she says, “The master plan is to report to this blog on a regular basis with photos, video, and commentary on the wildlife situation. There are plenty of people focused on the politics and blame game circulating throughout the media so I'll avoid that as much as possible.” As someone totally burned out on the political side of this mess despite my every attempt to ignore it, I can definitely get down with that! Initially the blog was being updated quite often, with at least one post per day, but lately has gone a bit quiet as she has left the Gulf and is probably still recovering. The posts provide helpful animal-focused coverage of the spill, including a list of all marine species in the Gulf and updates on NOAA’s actions, but some also have some more technical discussions of the oil spill and logistics of trying to contain it. The more recent posts are really well-reported, with a bunch of embedded links to news stories and weather-tracking sites in a post describing the phenomenon of “tar balls” (I’m not touching that one…). Her latest post was intended to be a brief recap of her time in the Gulf, in which she addresses the political situation somewhat circuitously by giving her impression of what’s really happening down there, which again is something I greatly appreciate – not the ins and outs and back-and-forths of the blame game, but the larger truth of how the region and those living in it are being affected.

DeepWater Blog - http://rucool.marine.rutgers.edu/deepwater/category/deepwater-blog/

I’m not sure if this totally qualifies, since a group of scientists rather than just one contribute to this blog, but it is a highly technical blog on a site called the “Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Portal” that is dedicated to “developing a portal that will consolidate many data streams to help response efforts.” The site is designed to be a resource for several “partners,” including government agencies, non-profits, businesses, and schools, many of which have acronyms that include the letters “OOS,” or Ocean Observation System. It is pretty much a “by scientists, for scientists” kind of blog, in contrast to the two others I outlined above. The blog posts contain tons of graphics and maps and charts that are really pretty but also completely incomprehensible to me. Gliders and drifters and Loop Currents, oh my! The idea seems to be to consolidate information, data, and analyses in one place to be viewed and used by many different groups in a variety of ways, which seems like a smart thing to be doing about now. A typical post includes an image of NOAA’s spill forecast for the day, with subsequent zoomings and other manipulations including overlaying satellite or radar images to try to predict what is going to happen next and what can be done. I may not be able to appreciate the information being presented on the blog, but I like the idea of people from different backgrounds and institutions working together to try to do whatever predicting and problem-solving they can.

TED Extra - Oil Spill Event- - Monday, June 28

OK - this doesn't count as one of my 3 blog posts but it looks like such an interesting opportunity that I had to share.

http://tedxoilspill.com/speakers/

How the gods must see the oil spill

Dan Satterfield, chief weather man for WHNT TV in Huntsville, Alabama, is not one of those mainstream media celebrities driven by the need to accumulate ratings with the quick and easy story full of sensational statements. Dan has a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric physics and a master’s degree in earth science. He forecasts the weather by day and blogs about topics “that I have too little time for on air” on his site, Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal. The fluffy-sounding title belies the solid science information he posts for his readers.

While most of his posts are about climate science and he seems particularly exorcised by the segment of the public that denies human impacts on global change, he takes great care to present material that is factual and from solid sources. He doesn’t dumb down information. He takes the time to explain information so that junior high kids can understand what he is talking about. In addition to his commitment to explaining the science, Dan has a good eye for what his readers might be interested in. Check out this image of a 1962 oil company advertisement he found.
http://wildwildweather.com/forecastblog/2010/06/truth-in-advertisinghumble-now-exxon-oil-advert-from-1962/

But it is Dan’s weather perspective on the oil spill that is unique. On April 20th Dan was preoccupied with the Alabama hurricanes. For nine days, his blog is filled with hurricane facts, maps, and photos. He didn’t post on the oil spill until April 29th. Even although he was late to the scene, Dan’s cloud’s eye view and interpretation of the information for his readers conveyed the severity of the spill immediately. From then on, he has tracked the spill as closely as the daily weather, producing ongoing commentary that is much like a serialized novel rich in imagery and detail. The climate science is an added bonus. If we only watch the oil spill from 30,000 feet we run the risk of disengaging from the suffering of people below much like the mythic Greek gods perched on Mount Olympus. But every now and then, we all should see the spill from this angle - thanks to Dan we can - to absorb the enormity of the event. Being gods for just a moment may move each of us to consider our role in the tragedy.

Riki Ott - Read with a Grain of Salt

Last Friday evening, I caught the last 15 minutes of the PBS program Need to Know with a report by Emily Senay, M.D. on the health effects of the BP oil spill. The report included interviews of heath and safety officials from BP, Louisiana State, and the Louisiana Shrimp Association. And two scientists were interviewed, Gina Soloman who is highlighted in Dr. Lemonade’s earlier post and Riki Ott, a Ph.D. marine toxicologist and self-described “Exxon Valdez survivor.” Knowing neither of these experts I gave each one a close listen (or as close as you can after a long week). Soloman spoke in measured tones about side effects, studies, and data gaps. Ott, more animated, talked about long term health effects that she observed among people who lived near Prince William Sound and worked cleanup of the Exxon-Valdez spill. She spoke of working with people for over 20 years and observing people “living with 100% disability to dead.”

Perhaps I should have been tipped off by Ott’s syntax compared to Soloman’s. But I was impressed by the title of her 2008 book mentioned in the PBS piece, “Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.” I jotted down “Riki Ott,”and went in search of a blog.

Google yielded www.rikiott.com, three blogs about the oil spill, and several YouTube videos of appearances on cable news. I’m afraid that, like the mainstream media who interviewed Ott on camera, I got snookered into following her train of thought by the alarm-sounding syntax paired with envirovocabulary. While I don’t discount her experiences in Alaska, I don’t think hers will be a credible blog on long term health effects to follow in the coming months. For example, in her first Huffington Post entry Ott says, “For two weeks, I've been in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama sharing stories from the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which devastated the community I lived and commercially fished in, with everyone from fishermen and women to local mayors to state governors and the crush of international media.”

Dr. Ott, sharing stories from 20 years ago with the people whose health should be monitored today is not scientific, it’s promoting an agenda. Her other blogs, linked below, pretend to reference reliable sources of data, but when you click you are linked to other advocacy sites. This is argument by acclamation, not data. Again, not very scientific.

Riki Ott versus Gina Soloman for following oil spill health effects - no contest. Like Dr. Lemonade, I’ll be following Gina Soloman and leave Riki Ott for MSNBC.

1) Need to Know, PBS, June 18, 2010
Story by Emily Senay MD on Long term health effects of the BP Oil Spill.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1525264389/

2) Riki Ott on May 17th
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/riki-ott/at-what-cost-bp-spill-res_b_578784.html
May 19th
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/riki-ott/human-health-tragedy-in-t_b_582655.html
June 11thhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/riki-ott/from-the-ground-bp-censor_b_608724.html

Building castles in the sand

What could be more American than trying to fight environmental disaster by creating a new one. According to Rob Young, professor of coastal ecology at Western Carolina University, that's exactly what we're doing.

One brilliant idea to avert further damage to wetland and coastal ecosystems is to build a 45-mile berm out of sand to protect the coast of Louisiana. The Army Corps of Engineers would move sand, presumably from another piece of coastline, to build a sand barrier 300-feet wide and standing six feet above the surface of the water.

In his blog post for Yale's "Environment 360," Young concludes that the ludicrous project is too expensive, too rushed and not likely to work. All of it driven by the blind need to do something, anything.

It's just this kind of near-sighted planning that got us here in the first place, however. Driven by annual reports and quarterly profits, the principles of both modern governance and corporate responsibility value immediate return over long-term success. Getting fast results is more important than getting it right.

Valued at half a billion dollars, building the berm comes with a big price tag for an uncertain outcome. But that's hardly a drop in the bucket for the likes of BP that recently committed at least $20 billion to the cleanup effort. More alarming is the fact that we would risk doing even more environmental damage to sensitive marine habitats by dredging up the ocean floor in an attempt to keep oil off the shore. This without any guarantees that the berm will actually keep oil out of sensitive areas; there is evidence to suggest it might only trap it there.

Young also points out that with expedited approval, the project did not receive proper review and few experts in the field of coastal ecology were consulted. Even EPA was given less than a day to file comments on the project.

This kind of quick action is exactly what we don't need, writes Young. Instead, this disaster should awaken us to the need to re-imagine environmental planning as the most important step of a project, one that should be considered carefully with input from as many stakeholders as possible. Not rushed out the door at the 11th hour.

No more Blue Crabs

The Gulf oil spill makes ecologist Nicole Heller feel "depressed and uncertain." Thankfully, these are not the only thoughts she leaves her readers with at the Climate Central blog.

No, Heller also goes on to explain the more pernicious and subtle ecosystem impacts that biologists are just starting to understand. Researchers like Dr. Erin Gray of Tulane University are finding that the oil spilled today could very well live on in generations of spawn to come. Gray is interested in Blue Crabs, in particular, which are a $40 million industry for Gulf fishermen. She studies population dynamics as they move from tiny larvae born in the open waters to fully grown crabs that inhabit estuaries. And her initial findings are disturbing to say the least.

Female blue crabs lay their eggs in the open water which then migrate inland after a couple months in later stages, writes Heller. It just so happens that breeding season in late spring and summer corresponds exactly with the timeline of the oil spill. That means the crabs will be traveling directly through the wake of the oil geyser.

That's not all. Once again, it also appears that the chemical dispersants used to break up the oil slick on the surface of the water are doing more harm than good. Gray believes she has identified tiny specks of oil--the kind created by using dispersants--inside the tissue of post-larval crabs. Gray is not a toxicologist and so is unsure what the ultimate effects will be on the Blue Crab. But her discovery points to yet another example of the disaster being much worse than we thought. It's not just the immediate damage--the oil-drenched birds and tar-balled beaches. It's the generations of aquatic life and wetland vegetation, things visible and invisible, that will be poisoned for many years to come with unknown influences on the environment.

Mother Nature is resilient, but even she has a breaking point. Heller and Gray have reminded us that if we haven't reached it yet, we will very soon.

It's not just the pelicans

For the past couple weeks, we've been bombarded with nothing but pelicans. Helpless brown pelicans, drowning in oil, splattered across the front pages of magazines and newspapers. So it comes as a rather macabre reprieve to ponder the plight of a different animal for a change: the sperm whale.

In a blog for CNN's running coverage of the "Gulf Coast Oil Disaster," Heather Heenahan lays out a brief history and status update of the sperm whale--many of which reside in the Mississippi Canyon just off the coast of Louisiana. She's a Duke University masters student in environmental management and summer fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and has spent much time studying whales behavior as social creatures.

Heenahan reminds us that, before our lust for petroleum, humans hunted in the Gulf of Mexico for oil of another sort: the oils from the fatty tissue of whales. The business was so lucrative, in fact, that sperm whales were hunted to near extinction in the very same waters where their lives are now again in grave danger.

Whales are at risk on numerous fronts from the oil spill, Heenahan writes. First, they swim through the deep waters that are now being inundated with oil. Second, they eat other fish that are currently bathing in the same muck. Third, when they surface after 45-minute dives, they take a nice long breath of aerosolized chemical dispersants that contain volatile organic compounds. Thus, the whales soak up, eat and breathe in the leaking oil as well as the foul toxins sprayed to help mitigate the fallout.

But ultimately, it's not about the whales or the pelicans. Heenahan at least pays lip service to the greedy habits of consumption that led BP to forsake warnings from the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission and other federal regulators in order to extract their profit-worthy bounty. Unfortunately, her attempts to attribute this disaster to our mutual complicity as oil-loving citizens of the consumerist First World feel half-hearted and uninspired. This calamity should be received as a sharp kick in the pants to every SUV-driving, solo-commuting, plane-hopping, wasteful American lifestyle-having, finger-pointing one of us. If we ever hope to avoid the next one we better do a whole lot more than "support clean energy" and "decrease oil consumption." The pelicans, the whales, and any future humans who hope to get some enjoyment from life on this planet all depend on it.

The Eloquence of Mucky Flip-Flops

Scientist measures X. Scientist models Y. Scientist offers a highly nuanced response to research paper published in a different peer-reviewed journal. Such is the discourse of science. But to outsiders, it often adds up to a giant, baffling... huh?

We know scientists are smart, that they do important work, and that they care—a lot. But sometimes it’s hard to tell that scientists live and breathe the same air as the rest of us, that they share our concerns, fears, and hopes. Perhaps this is because scientists are trained to be clinically objective. Perhaps it’s because the language of science is not readily understood, except by other scientists.

Carl Safina gets it. Macarthur Fellow, Pew Scholar, media gadfly (see here on the Colbert Report discussing the oil spill), author, teacher, co-founder and president of the Blue Ocean Institute—and yes, holder of a PhD in Ecology—Safina's mission is to move people with science, as evidenced by the tag-lines on both his self-titled blog (“Inspiration, Science, Nature. Hope.”) and his Blue Ocean Institute ("...works through science, art, and literature to inspire solutions and a deeper connection with nature").

Not surprisingly, Safina has written several posts on the situation in the Gulf of Mexico (see here, here, here, and here). Slightly unusual is that Safina’s posts are based on recent visits. And more unusual still is that he doesn’t just write about his observations, he also shows them. Safina's photographs of the oil spill, taken from a helicopter, a boat, and during walks on a local beach, are not scientific but they are evidence that it is possible to be both a scientist and an impassioned citizen (see his caption on the image of plastic garbage bags used for a beach clean-up). His photographs capture both the human and ecological impacts and prove, too, that he is living in our world-- one in which children swim amidst gooey tar balls, floating brown fingers of oil, and blackened, mucky flip-flops. In short, a world that is surprising, chaotic, and often uncontrollable.

To prove why science matters, scientists must respond to events like the Deepwater Horizon spill and many will—over weeks, months, and years to come. Kudos to those who are offering analysis in real-time and double kudos to scientists like Safina who are getting their feet dirty in the process.

Samantha Joye and gulfblog: cataloging disaster

According to WNEG’s website, a scientific team funded by the National Science Foundation set sail on May 25, 2010 for a two-week survey of the damage from the continuing Deepwater oil spill. The team comprises scientists from University of Southern Mississippi, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and University of California, Santa Barbara, and is led by Samantha Joye, PhD, of the University of Georgia. When Joye is not reviewing the gas chromatograph output or mapping underwater oil plumes, she blogs about the team’s work.

The blog describes what the team collected, reams of data that catalogs dissolved oxygen and methane concentrations, outlines the expansion of the underwater oil plumes and surface slicks, quantifies salinity, chlorophyll levels, and water temperature at various depths, and most importantly, documents the presence of CDOM’s,or colored dissolved organic matter—oil. Joye also notes the impotent crowd gathering on the surface of the sea, what she calls “the city of ships.”

She records the ugliness simply, without drama, and so when she offers us a moment of contrast—the ship breaks out of the slick into clear blue water while a pod of spinner dolphins dances off the bow—we see the tragedy fully illuminated.

Read this blog and see photos of the team working at:
http://gulfblog.uga.edu/

WNEG website, accessed 6/20/2010:
http://www.wneg32.tv/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3190:uga-scientists-blog-oil-spill-research&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=18

Richard Denison Blogs on the Chemical Dispersants Used in the Oil Spill Clean-up

Dr. Richard Denison is a Senior Scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). He has 25 years of experience in the areas of environmental policy, hazard and risk assessment, and management for industrial chemicals and nanomaterials. Denison has been writing regularly since mid-May on the EDF’s Chemicals and Nanomaterials Blog about the dangers of using inadequately tested and ineffective dispersants to aid in cleaning up the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. As many as one million gallons of two dispersants, Corexit® 9527 and Corexit® 9500, have been released into the Gulf. Denison deftly highlights the key issues surrounding BP’s use of these chemicals. He notes that they are “among the least effective of the 18 dispersants that EPA has approved under the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan, and they appear to be among the more toxic based on limited short-term toxicity tests conducted on fish and shrimp.” Denison emphasizes that the long-term effects of these chemicals on the marine environment as well as the workers exposed to them far from known. He notes how the Toxic Substances Control Act denies the EPA the power to develop even basic safety information for chemicals that are being brought onto the market, or to require the replacement of chemicals that have been proven to be dangerous. Denison occasionally provides links to articles of interest, such as a posting on The Pump Handle by Elizabeth Grossman that questions whether the health and safety of response workers to the Gulf oil crisis are being ensured. Overall, Dennison’s blog posts are informative and easy to read – two attributes of a good blogger.

David Guggenheim: the Ocean Doctor

David E. Guggenheim eschewed medical school to become a doctor—an ocean doctor. After pocketing his first master's degree in population and aquatic biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a second in regional biology from the University of Pennsylvania, and finally earning a PhD in environmental studies and public policy, Guggenheim set out to conquer global warming, unsustainable fish-farming practices, and Siberian forest ecology while working with numerous government agencies and private environmental groups.

Now the explorer and conservationist works and blogs out of 1planet1ocean, his non-profit consultancy firm based in Washington, DC. He uses his oil spill-related posts to offer his opinions on sustainable aquaculture techniques and to advance his efforts to protect Cuba’s marine environment through The Ocean Foundation.

Guggenheim enhances his posts with underwater video and vibrant photos. You can view his efforts at:
http://www.oceandoctor.org/

Oil Spill Blogs

http://gulfblog.uga.edu/

This Gulf Oil Blog is sponsored by the University of Georgia – Atlanta Department of Marine Sciences, Dr. Samantha Joye, a professor of marine science at UGA, has been writing about efforts to clean up the Gulf oil spill and the severity of the problem. Her last few posts have been answering many questions that came to her e-mail, which is posted on the blog for that purpose. Most of the questions are fairly academic – I did not understand what they all meant. So I think this blog would be a good resource for other scientists. She posts regularly and also includes pictures sometimes. Here is article about the blog: http://www.wneg32.tv/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3190:uga-scientists-blog-oil-spill-research&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=18


http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2010/06/the_worst_oil_spill_in_us_hist.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink

On Science Blogs, a scientist (username “GrrlScientist”) disputes the claim that the current oil spill is the worst in U.S. history. She claims that a 1910 oil spill from California is the worst and includes a video from CNN about this spill. She has received a couple of comments on her post.

http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2010/05/oil_spill_estimation.php

Rhett Allain is an Associate Professor of Physics at Southeastern Louisiana University. His blog, Dot Physics, looks at different issues in physics. This particular post is aimed at how to estimate the flow of oil into the Gulf. He starts with a video of the underwater oil spill, then makes detailed calculations that I don’t follow to come up with an estimate of how much oil is leaking into the ocean. This is the only post I found where he talked about the Gulf Oil Spill.

O

Laura Geselbracht Highlights the Potential Effects of the Oil Spill on Florida's Marine Wildlife

Laura Geselbracht is a marine conservation planner with The Nature Conservancy in Florida. Geselbracht recently posted Gulf Oil Spill: A View from Florida on The Nature Conservancy’s Cool Green Science conservation blog. I like this blog posting because Geselbracht concisely summarizes the potential threat of the Gulf oil spill to local marine wildlife on the Florida coastline. Having relatives on the west and east coasts of Florida, I really want to know what the sunshine state may be facing in the weeks and months to come. Geselbracht worked in Washington state when the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred, so she saw first hand how oil spills can threaten various species. She mentions the Tenyo Maro oil spill, which occurred in 1991 off the coast of Washington near the Canadian border. Oil from the Tenyo Maro spill was taken up by ocean currents and ultimately affected a substantial amount of the Washington coast as well as some of the Oregon coast. Geselbracht provides some information on the Loop Current, which is a warm current in the Gulf of Mexico that loops around southern Florida on its way to merging with the Gulf Stream. Many fear that the oil slick could be picked up by these major currents, and therefore impact much of Florida’s coastline and coastal resources. Geselbracht highlights a number of vulnerable species, including the Florida manatee, American crocodile, smalltooth sawfish, the spoonbill, five species of sea turtles, and several terrapin species. The thought of losing any of these species due to the oil spill is unthinkable, and Geselbracht’s blog posting effectively makes that point.

Gina Solomon: healing the waters

Polymath Gina Solomon blogs on the Natural Resources Defense Council site about the health effects of the BP oil spill on clean-up workers, coastal dwellers, fishermen, and anyone else intimately involved in the disaster. In recent weeks Solomon has clambered onto the deck of a cleanup boat in the gulf, and using a hand-held monitor, has found volatile organic compounds (VOC’s) hanging in the air above the oil spill—despite BP’s assurances to the contrary. She is no stranger to gulf coast disaster, having pitched in after Katrina by measuring toxin and mold levels in soil, air and water. But disaster is not all she does.

A physician trained at Harvard and Yale, Solomon sees patients a clinic at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, where she directs the environmental medicine fellowship program. She also holds the post of Senior Scientist at NRDC.

Solomon the physician, teacher, and scientist is above all Solomon the activist, and in the best sense of the word. Every blog post crackles with the surly passion of a doer: “I have also repeatedly called upon BP and the Coast Guard to publicly release the air quality data that they claim shows the air is "safe" out there where hundreds of people are working….”

You can catch Solomon's blog at the NRDC's site
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/gsolomon/, and at the Huffington Post.

The Gulf Oil Blog Takes Readers on a Two-Week Scientific Expedition to the Oil Spill

Dr. Samantha Joye is an oceanographer and Professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, Georgia. Joye’s laboratory conducts research on the biogeochemical cycling of nutrients, dissolved gases, trace metals, carbon, and sulfur in a variety of lakes and coastal and ocean environments. Joye was a member of the expedition that discovered the deepwater plumes in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion. In late May, Joye led a team of microbiologists, geologists, and biogeochemists into the Gulf for a two-week expedition to conduct a comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of the largest of the underwater plumes. They established the Gulf Oil Blog to bring this work to the public.

What I like most about this blog is its first person perspective. Joye brings the reader along with her on the boat, and it’s a rather wild ride. She shows how difficult it can be to actually locate the oil plume. She explains to readers what they are measuring in the water samples they collect, and she answers questions submitted by the general public to the blog.

Although Joye is an accomplished academic scientist, she is rather adept at writing in a manner that engages the layperson. For example, her team noticed an oil sheen on the water that they had collected from within the plume. She wrote: “You could see it. Everybody saw it. Everybody got excited. Seeing is believing. Even more, the bottles from the plume layers smelled strongly of petroleum. The bottles from above and below the plume did not.”

The Gulf Oil Blog also contains a Resources page with links to reputable sites providing information on the present oil spill as well as other noteworthy oil spills. The Resources page also includes a link to Joye’s Testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology, Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, which she submitted on June 9, 2010.

Notably, Joye is co-author of a paper in press at the journal Nature Geoscience titled “Offshore oceanic impacts from the BP oil spill.” Joye’s paper will be just one of many that will surely be published in upcoming months by scientists studying this significant and continuing environmental disaster.

Finding Sure Footing on Slippery Ground

Our conversations go something like this. Me: “It’s unprecedented! The worst oil-spill ever!” Him: “I hate when people use the word ‘unprecedented’. During World War II more tankers lost more oil in more spills over a larger area.” Me: “Those spills happened at different places on different days. Completely different scenario. And all the spills took place in shallow water. The deep water impacts are entirely unknown. It's a feeble comparison.” And so on.

My friend says he can not trust most environmental reporting, that it is tinged with hysteria and marred by bias. I am equally for dispassionate, rigorous, science-based environmental reporting, and by extension, environmental policies. Are there sources out there to bolster my case that the Deepwater spill is enormous and unprecedented?

In a post on The Oil Drum, Cutler J. Cleveland compares rates of release between naturally occurring oil “seeps”, the man-made spills, including Deepwater and others. The article is backed up with references to scientific literature (hooray!). But is the author a screaming environmentalist?

Cleveland is a professor of geography and the environment at Boston University with joint appointments in the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies and the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer Range Future. He is also the author of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill entry in the Encyclopedia of Earth, an initiative that is backed by the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE). NCSE’s board includes a mix of corporate, environmental, and current and former government officials. It's not full proof, but a promising indicator that my friend would entertain Cleveland's analysis.

Highlights are Cleveland's conclusion (yes, it’s bad), references, and a compelling line graph on the “Estimates on the quantity of oil released from the Deepwater Horizon accident, from natural oil seeps in the entire Gulf of Mexico, and from some notable historic U.S oil spills.”

Alas, Cleveland does not use the word “unprecedented”, but I stand, sadly, sadly hopeful.

A Mental Organizer for Ecological News from the Gulf

I’d never thought much about brown pelicans until the explosive wipe-out of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Now I want to rescue them (turns out you need to have training to rescue oiled wildlife). No question, I feel bad for the fishermen and others suddenly out of work and struggling with economic loss—but I worry more about the fate of the wildlife and have been moved to tears by media coverage showing oil-drenched marshes and dead and dying creatures. Still, the majority of mass media reports seem to focus on the present and typically on one angle. Missing is a "big picture" schematic to outline both current and future deleterious impacts.

In an article posted on Deep Sea News, Miriam Goldstein, a doctoral student in biological oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, identifies the five leading impacts of an oil spill on wildlife and habitat—direct oiling, indirect oiling, reproductive failure, habitat destruction, and long-term chronic effects—explaining in layman’s terms what each one is and why it is critical to keep in mind. Goldstein calls her article an “anatomy” and this is apt because she offers a structural framework with which the ecological reverberations can be more fully understood. Her own area of research on the impact of plastic particulates on marine invertebrates—the largest garbage dumps on earth are actually floating at sea—attunes her to the challenges associated with studying vast, ever-changing, complex events with multiple causes and consequences.