NOAA Launches Mission to Solve BP Oil Mystery

(Sept. 24) -- The NOAA research ship Pisces set off on a new mission today to search for oil that a University of Georgia biologist reported finding on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico earlier this month.

The trip is part of an initiative launched by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to sort out the contradictory findings by the government's chief science agency and independent scientists who have been studying what's left of the oil from BP's now-dead Macondo well.

"We have had no new oil introduced [from BP's well] since July 15 and no recoverable oil since around Aug. 1," Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft said in a teleconference briefing today, before the Pisces departed from Pascagoula, Miss. "The challenge now is what is on the seafloor. ... We need to verify what is in that water column, what is at the seafloor down to depths exceeding 5,000 feet. That's where we're going in the next phase of the operation."

The effort follows NOAA's much-disputed report in August that claimed that half of the 4.9 million barrels of oil had disappeared and that another 25 percent had been broken down by dispersants discharged into the gulf.

At the time, independent scientists questioned NOAA's methodology and criticized the government's spin on its data, which suggested much of the oil had simply vanished.

Then, on Aug. 19, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts published in Science magazine a report that mapped a 22-mile-long underwater oil plume. That finding was itself contradicted by another government-sponsored study that contended the plume had been all but completely consumed by oil-eating microbes.

Scientists say the "snapshot" of the oil in the gulf -- as told through nearly 30,000 water samples collected since last spring -- changes nearly every day. The complete story of what happened in the gulf may not be known for years.

Janet Baran, NOAA's coordinator for subsea science on the new Pisces mission, said at today's teleconference briefing that scientists are finding diminishing amounts of oil in the deep water as the oil continues to degrade.

Three NOAA ships continue to collect near-shore samples. The Pisces and two other ships will begin doing sediment sampling within 25 miles of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead, she said.

Baran said NOAA has conferred with scientists at Woods Hole about its findings regarding the plume. The NOAA team also has been in touch with Samantha Joye, the University of Georgia biologist who reported finding oil on the ocean floor about 16 nautical miles from the Macondo wellhead. In a Sept. 5 blog posting, Joye said the core samples taken did not appear to be oil that leaks into gulf waters from natural seeps. Samples taken from natural seeps contain oil "top to bottom," she wrote. In the core samples Joye collected, the oil appeared to have settled "just like snow falls from the sky to the ground."

Baran said Joye "has shared her locations and we will be revisiting those" to collect more sediment samples.

The Pisces will return to Mississippi on Oct. 4.