Track Residual Oil from the Deepwater Horizon

If you walked on Gulf Coast beaches this summer, April 2010 might seem like a distant memory. The sugar-sand moves around a lot, covering and uncovering things. You might have been more worried about stepping on a jellyfish than stepping on a tar ball.

Auburn has a long history of research along the Gulf Coast, and after the Macondo Well blew out, that work continued on a large scale. While oil flowed eastward down the coast, two Auburn researchers, Dr. T. Prabhakar Clement and Dr. Joel Hayworth, sampled the spreading slick and determined a chemical “DNA” for oil coming from the spill. Globs of the sticky goo washed up at Dauphin Island, Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, Pensacola, and Gulf Islands National Seashore.

Five years later, the tar balls still show up, particularly after storms. It seems that large quantities of submerged oil – popularly mislabeled “tar mats” – exist somewhere between the coast and the first sand bar.  Oil, laced with toxic chemicals and mixed with sand, is buried under upper layers of sands that shift around.  After storms, chunks of this may break off and get tossed onshore, carrying with them the chemical cocktail that proves they came from that awful day in April 2010.

Finding and mapping the submerged oil will help scientists focus their efforts to understand the long-term effects of the spill, and you can help.

Your support of this project will accelerate the mapping effort by building an underwater, automated core sampler for Dr. Hayworth’s continuing work.  On the gulf floor, this tool burrows itself directly into the sand, pulling up a cylinder of what lies beneath and allowing Dr. Hayworth to figure out what and how much is still out there. 

The leftover oil isn’t going away anytime soon, but your gift can bring some understanding of the catastrophe. And Dr. Hayworth’s work may unlock the key to making sure we have fish to catch and shrimp to eat for generations to come. Thanks in advance for giving today and for sharing this work with others.