One journey I’ll be following closely over the next week is the voyage of the Cape Hatteras, a 135-foot research vessel operated by the Duke/University of North Carolina Oceanographic Consortium. As we reported here last week, scientists from these and other universities are sailing into the heart of the oil spill to study its environmental impact. After a stop in Gulfport, Miss., the crew departed Saturday for the spill site in the Gulf of Mexico and is blogging from the boat.
The scientists will study issues like how the vast oil spill has affected the oxygen content of the gulf’s waters, an issue of crucial importance for sea life, and what is happening to the methane gas released by the leak. Because methane dissolves uniformly in seawater, scientists are hoping they can use methane measurements to arrive at a better estimate of the size of the spill. (That plume that scientists have seen spewing in deep waters is a mix of oil and gas.)
This is no ordinary research mission: the scientists’ toolkit includes Hazmat equipment.