Expedition to the Deep Slope, Year 2, provides understanding of life at deep water seeps

In the summer of 2006, TAMUCC scientists went at sea on the research vessels GYRE and ATLANTIS.  Their work is a component of a multi-year, multi-institution project administered by TDI-Brooks International.  The TAMUCC participants scouted possible locations of deep-sea chemosynthetic communities along the Gulf of Mexico slope using a camera system designed by Professor Ian MacDonald.  MacDonald and Science & Technology student Adriana Leiva followed up with dives in the famous submarine ALVIN.

This year, MacDonald and graduate student Oscar Garcia returned to many of the same sites and several new ones.  The five-week expedition began on June 4 and returned to Galveston on July 6. RV RONALD BROWN and the remotely operated vehicle JASON completed 15 dives at sites from 1000 to 2700 m depths across ~650 km of the outer slope.  Garcia’s Ph.D. research concerns using satellite remote sensing to find natural oil and gas seeps.  A grant from NASA has provided for major new collections of satellite images that correspond to the RV BROWN expedition.

The region contains some of the nation’s most important remaining domestic energy reserves.  It is also home to large communities of tube worms and mussels that feed on the byproducts of oil and gas seepage.  One result from this year’s research was better understanding of the many diverse and fragile deep-sea corals that live at seeps.

MacDonald will be analyzing photographic surveys over the seeps sites as well as time-lapse images taken over extended intervals.  These data will shed light on the community structure of seeps particularly the large, mobile animals that are sometimes missed by submarine operations.

Understanding and protecting these biological resources as energy exploration and production goes forward is the mission of two agencies: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency and the Minerals Management Agency.  Partnership between government agencies and academic institutions like TAMUCC provides the broadest possible expertise for meeting project goals.

More Photos

Quicktime panorama: On the Bottom

Visit the expedition's website