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.
Showing posts with label oil spill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oil spill. Show all posts
Sunday, June 20, 2010
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.
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.
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