{"id":85,"date":"2013-07-31T16:14:33","date_gmt":"2013-07-31T20:14:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carthe.org\/blog\/?p=85"},"modified":"2014-06-20T13:16:01","modified_gmt":"2014-06-20T17:16:01","slug":"hercules-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/carthe.org\/blog\/hercules-response\/","title":{"rendered":"Hercules Response"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally published on July 31, 2013 in the University of Miami Rosenstiel School Blog<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Written by Nathan Laxague<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t a large blowout.\u00a0 Or a particularly messy one.\u00a0 Or one that required multiple plugging attempts in deep water.\u00a0 No- the blowout of the well worked by\u00a0Hercules 265<\/a>\u00a0was thankfully benign in comparison to numerous disasters in recent memory.\u00a0 While attempts to quantify the environmental damage are underway, initial observations show a relative lack of the damaging oil responsible for mucking up the fragile Gulf coast.\u00a0\"hercules<\/p>\n

Photo by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement<\/em><\/p>\n

CARTHE<\/a>, the Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbon in the Environment, works to predict where oil might go in the event of an oil\/gas spill, like this one.\u00a0 Our involvement in the studying of the immediate aftermath of this incident began as a string of brief, terse e-mails and texts on Wednesday, July 24th<\/span>.\u00a0 Experiments were moved.\u00a0 Meetings were bumped.\u00a0 The Consortium\u00a0would<\/i>\u00a0be involved in an observational project.\u00a0 The exact details of that involvement (formulated over meetings and conference calls) were told to us as follows: two to three PhD students would prepare ~20 surface drifters (each equipped with the now-standard SPOT GPS device and extended battery pack), drive to Cocodrie, Louisiana, and board the\u00a0R\/V Acadiana<\/a>\u00a0for a fast-response deployment.\u00a0 The Acadiana is owned and operated byLUMCON<\/a>\u00a0(Louisiana Universities Marine CONsortium).<\/p>\n

\"nathanThe journey went as any such road trip should- 1000 miles of flat, open road and more country stations than any reasonable person could handle (excluding, perhaps, my partner-in-science, fellow student\u00a0Conor Smith<\/a>).\u00a0 Our 12:00 AM (Friday night\/Saturday morning) arrival was followed by a 12:30 AM loading of the boat and a 1:30 AM bedtime.\u00a0 We squeezed in a bit of a nap, were on the dock at 4:45 AM, and were creeping through the bayou before we saw the sun.\u00a0 The Acadiana was advertised by Max, the vessel\u2019s Captain, as a ship that rode the waves like a cork.\u00a0 It\u2019s difficult for me to describe my body\u2019s reaction to those cork-like motions, but suffice it to say that never have two-foot waves seemed so fierce (as far as the tasks of reading or keeping a meal down are concerned).<\/p>\n

Shall I get on with it, then?<\/p>\n

The 12-hour transit was filled by a four-hour drifter deployment operation, during which our 21 floating detectives were distributed about the Hercules 265 rig.\u00a0 Much like during our 2012\u00a0GLAD experiment<\/a>, the drifters were organized into an arrangement of triplets (in this case, triads of 200m-spaced drifters encircling Hercules at a range of 8 km).\u00a0 This method marries the traditional dispersion experiment with the practical, incident-response targeted drifter release.\u00a0 The upside of this is a data set from which to glean sets of information satisfying multiple ends.\u00a0 We look to extract both dispersion statistics (a measure of how water- or oil- spreads out) and information about the behavior of the Gulf in the immediate spatial and temporal vicinity of a rig incident (the latter being something that GLAD, two years removed from Deepwater Horizon, lacked).<\/p>\n

It is a bit too early to comment on the data itself.\u00a0 But as the SPOTs tick closer and closer to their demises, it is our hope that they will paint for us a picture of upper-ocean transport that is both scientifically rich and immediately practical.<\/p>\n