Gulf of Mexico Expedition

Natalia Sidorovskaia, Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Physics, has just returned from a successful 10-day Gulf of Mexico expedition onboard the LUMCON R/V Pelican. She led a team of 14 scientists as the LADC-GEMM consortium director. LADC-GEMM is one of the twelve consortia recently funded by BP/GOMRI to study long-term environmental impact of the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The research team deployed five deep water moorings and a Seaglider in the vicinity of the Deep Water Horizon incident site. Both platforms will collect passive acoustic data for several months. The data will be later used by the LADC-GEMM scientists to continue monitoring the long-term effects of the 2010 oil spill on deep-diving marine mammals (dolphins, sperm whales, and beaked whales). During the field operations LADC-GEMM was also using a real-time acoustic data analysis from arrays towed by two autonomous surface vehicles (C-Worker 6 and C-Enduro). The team is excited to report that they had many visual and acoustic encounters with sperm whales and dolphins in the area. Read more at www.ladcgemm.org. (Photo of Carl Richter and Natalia Sidorovskaia by Doug Dugas.)