GULF OF MEXICO SEAFLOOR STABILITY AND GAS HYDRATE MONITORING STATION PROJECT
The gas hydrates research Consortium (HRC), established and administered at the University if Mississippi's Center for Marine Research and Environmental Technology (CMRET) has been active on many fronts in FY 03. Extension of the original contract through March 2004, has allowed completion of many projects that were incomplete at the end of the original project period due, primarily, to severe weather and difficulties in rescheduling test cruises. The primary objective of the Consortium, to design and emplace a remote sea floor station for the monitoring of gas hydrates in the Gulf of Mexico by the year 2005 remains intact. However, the possibility of levering HRC research off of the Joint Industries Program (JIP) became a possibility that has demanded reevaluation of some of the fundamental assumptions of the station format. These provisions are discussed in Appendix A. Landmark achievements of FY03 include: (1) Continuation of Consortium development with new researchers and additional areas of research contribution being incorporated into the project. During this period, NOAA's National Undersea Research Program's (NURP) National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology (NIUST) became a Consortium funding partner, joining DOE and Minerals Management Service (MMS); (2) Very successful annual and semiannual meetings in Oxford Mississippi in February and September, 2003; (3) Collection of piston cores from MC798 in support of the effort to evaluate the site for possible monitoring station installation; (4) Completion of the site evaluation effort including reports of all localities in the northern Gulf of Mexico where hydrates have been documented or are strongly suspected to exist on the sea floor or in the shallow subsurface; (5) Collection and preliminary evaluation of vent gases and core samples of hydrate from sites in Green Canyon and Mississippi Canyon, northern Gulf of Mexico; (6) Monitoring of gas activity on the sea floor, acoustically and thermally; (7) Design, construction, and successful deployment of an in situ pore-water sampling device; (8) Improvements to the original Raman spectrometer (methane sensor); (9) Laboratory demonstration of the impact of bacterially-produced surfactants' rates of hydrate formation; (10) Construction and sea floor emplacement and testing--with both watergun and ship noise sources--of the prototypal vertical line array (VLA); (11) Initiation of studies of spatial controls on hydrates; (12) Compilation and analyses of seismic data, including mapping of surface anomalies; (13) Additional field verification (bottom samples recovered), in support of the site selection effort; (14) Collection and preliminary analyses of gas hydrates from new sites that exhibit variant structures; (15) Initial shear wave tests carried out in shallow water; (16) Isolation of microbes for potential medicinal products development; (17) Preliminary modeling of occurrences of gas hydrates.
- Research Organization:
- University of Mississippi (US)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- FC26-00NT40920
- OSTI ID:
- 838881
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 1 Nov 2004
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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