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.