The disaster of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico made headlines throughout the summer, but for two Columbia experts, the challenge is calculating the extent of the damage.
An ongoing concern for experts has been the difficulty of accurately measuring the damage of the spill, but Timothy Crone and Maya Tolstoy, two marine geophysicists at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, say that a new analysis technique has proven fairly successful.
At the peak of the oil spill crisis—after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in April—the well leaked up to 68,000 barrels of oil per day, according to marine geophysicists at Lamont-Doherty.
BP’s leaking oil well was officially sealed last month, but officials said they could not measure the amount of oil that came out of the well. Using a new method to analyze underwater video of the well riser, Crone and Tolstoy found that the well leaked 56,000 to 68,000 barrels a day.
Crone has been exploring different ways to measure the flow rate of hydrothermal vents, which are fissures in the earth’s surface that emit geothermally heated water. One method he recently developed enables individuals to use a camera instead of an instrument.
“The method is designed to be noninvasive, based on video, where you just train a camera in the flow as opposed to putting an instrument,” he said. “The video analysis is then used to track the motion of the flow, and then those measurements of apparent motion are converted to a real flow rate.”
Crone said the conversion is done with knowledge of the scale of the objects being imaged and the area over which the flow is occurring, in order to convert the 2-D image into a volume flow rate.
He developed the method—optical plume velocimetry—in a 2008 thesis on a similar topic.
“The flow of oil from the leak of Mexico was very similar in terms of the optics, so we were able to apply the technique to the oil spill,” he said.
According to Tolstoy, the amount of oil spilled after the disaster would fill Yankee Stadium.
The Obama administration has received a lot of heat for its handling of the crisis, with some critics saying the administration could have responded sooner and more decisively.
“I suppose that info and data regarding the flow rate could’ve been shared more widely with scientists and the public sooner, and that would’ve helped with obtaining a more accurate estimate of the flow rate in the earlier days of the crisis,” Crone said.
Tolstoy agreed, adding, “It would have been valuable to have scientists’ hands on the data right away.”
Students appeared to be concerned about the attention BP received throughout the crisis, but Crone said that he focused more on the scientific component of the oil spill crisis.
“The politics of it is sort of an aside thing for me,” Crone said. “My primary focus is science. I kept myself as a scientist throughout the investigation.”
Tolstoy said that they are now shifting gears, looking at how the oil spill rate has changed and will change over time.
Steven Cohen, executive director and chief operating officer at Columbia’s Earth Institute, stressed that more research should be done on the long-term effect of the spill.
“Now it’s time to figure out what damage was done to the ecosystem,” he said.
Ajit Subramaniam, a Lamont Associate Research Professor, said he is not optimistic.
Understanding the amount spilled is key, he said. On the current state of the situation, he added, “It is not okay. The challenge is to monitor it.”
Crone said that while there are still some unanswered questions, he feels that his research has improved the data that is currently available to scientists.
“My research into hydrothermal vents was able to solve a problem that had immediate impact into a pressing societal problem.”
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