Helen K White Lab

Dr. Chris Reddy visited the lab yesterday to discuss his work on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He told us about the chemistry of oil, the subsurface plume and a little about the people involved.  I was excited to learn about how collaborative this research is and so far has included chemists, ocean engineers, hydrothermal vent geologists, underwater robots and very cooperative ship captains. During his visit, Chris and Alissa talked about aerosols, and we obtained some new leads. Ori also talked to Chris about her  findings of oil in the Delaware River. In the picture below they are discussing the unresolved complex mixture (UCM), which is a typical signature of weathered oil in the environment.

discussing the unresolved complex mixture

The Friday before Fall break was unseasonably sunny. This was welcome news to the lab group as we had a trip planned to the Delaware River to collect more sediment cores for Ori’s thesis project. Here are some photos from the trip.

Katie and I spent Saturday afternoon in the lab of Dr. Erik Cordes of Temple University. Erik’s graduate student Jay Lunden taught Katie how to separate coral tissue from skeleton. Erik also showed us an isopod collected from the Gulf. A scavenger of the deep! Erik then left to head to the Fox TV studio. This story is reported in many places, check it out. We will be heading there in December. More news to follow.

Lab group meetings are open to all  students interested in learning more about the group’s research. An important discovery was made this week in lab group meeting. We can fit 5 people on the couch.

L-R, Louis De Rosa '11, Katie Sheline '13, Misha Sims '13 (BMC), Liz Coward '12, Jen Reeve '14

These photos of Katie Sheline ’13 prepping samples of corals for biomarker analysis, were taken a few weeks ago, but we just ran the extracts on the GCMS. This was a quick first pass attempt to see what compounds would be obtained. The expected fatty acids and sterol biomarkers were observed. Now comes the quantification aspect to determine the quantity of material need for the Gulf of Mexico project.