Project Overview

Summary:

In January 2015, Dr. Samantha (Mandy) Joye at University of Georgia, Department of Marine Sciences, was awarded an RFP-IV grant to lead the GoMRI project entitled “Ecosystem Impacts of Oil and Gas Inputs to the Gulf-2 (ECOGIG-2)”.  This grant was extended through June 2020 and the total award amount for the 5-year project was $21,475,648. ECOGIG-2 consisted of 15 collaborative institutions and approximately 91 research team members (including students).

The ECOGIG-2 (Ecosystem Impacts of Oil and Gas Inputs to the Gulf - 2) Research Consortium conducted multi-scale, multidisciplinary research to study the impacts and fates of oil and gas released in offshore waters of the Gulf of Mexico (hereafter, Gulf). More than 20,000 natural seeps inject oil and gas into the Gulf, generating complex benthic ecosystems intimately linked to seepage and affecting biological communities and chemical dynamics from the seafloor to the sea surface. Seeps and their environs are also influenced by complex large- and small-scale patterns in physical circulation, and by nutrient inputs from the Mississippi River system. The Gulf is, therefore, an ideal natural system for studying the pathways and regulation of hydrocarbon metabolism in a complex oceanographic environment to elucidate how physical and biological processes determine their fate.

The ECOGIG-2 team worked to improve our ability to understand, quantify, and predict the large- and small-scale processes that distribute and degrade hydrocarbons throughout the Northern Gulf, from the deep seafloor to the ocean surface. ECOGIG-2 scientists worked at scales ranging from molecules to ecosystems, and from point source inputs to the entire Gulf system. The program employed novel, highly sophisticated technologies to achieve an in situ presence, which captured time series of benthic and water column dynamics on temporal scales from a few weeks to as long as a year. The ECOGIG-2 team continued their unprecedented time-series sampling to track impacts of and recovery from the Deepwater Horizon blowout in benthic systems, many of which still retain a clear imprint of the incident.

Scientific Approach: ECOGIG-2 addressed fundamental scientific problems that span GoMRI Research Themes 1 through 4. The primary research goals were to:

• Elucidate and quantify the ecosystem impacts and fates of natural and anthropogenic hydrocarbon inputs in benthic and pelagic environments, and the role of natural seepage in generating the biological capacity to mitigate accidental hydrocarbon releases.
• Quantify how hydrocarbons are incorporated into marine oil snow and evaluate the role of oil snow as a fate for hydrocarbons introduced into the Gulf's waters.
• Determine how natural perturbations, such as tectonic activity, large storms, variability in bottom currents or gas hydrate destabilization may affect hydrocarbon release rates, which in turn impact biogeochemical and biological processes in sediments and in the water column.
• Quantify the impacts of extreme accidental hydrocarbon discharges and purposeful dispersant additions on different biological communities through in situ time-series observations complemented by experimental work done at sea and in the laboratory.

Outreach Highlights

               As of June 30, 2020, ECOGIG-2 team members participated in more than 675 outreach related activities including: school presentations, invited talks, public events, documentaries, summer camps, social media engagement, news articles and more. A few of our key outreach products and activities include the Ocean Discovery Zone, The Adventures of Zack and Molly, and the Ocean Discovery Camp. The Ocean Discovery Zone is a hands-on activity station designed to give non-scientists of all ages access to information on deep sea exploration, oil and methane in marine ecosystems, and the importance of healthy oceans. Visitors can meet and talk with scientists and outreach specialists to learn about research expeditions and the tools they use to study deep sea ecosystems. The Ocean Discovery Zone is used for a variety of events and schools throughout the year, including exhibits at college football games. This initiative - Science at the Stadium - began in 2014 at the University of Georgia and expanded to Florida State University and Pennsylvania State University in 2015 and 2016. Additional Ocean Discovery Zone activities included the Atlanta Science Festival, Philadelphia Science Festival, Calvert Marine Days (Maryland), Ocean Discovery Day (New Hampshire), Eventapalooza - Ocean Friends Forever (Pennsylvania), the Athens Montessori School Fall Festival, The Kids Interested in Technology, Engineering and Science Festival (Atlanta), and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory open house. Since its inception, the Ocean Discovery Zone and ECOGIG Outreach staff have reached >30,000 people.

The 3-part Adventures of Zack and Molly science cartoon series was released in 2018; in 2020 a fourth cartoon was added. The series was produced in collaboration with Sherman's Lagoon creator and filmmaker Jim Toomey. The cartoon features Zack, a Millennial more interested in his smartphone than the larger world around him. His online request for a roommate is answered by Molly, a tech-savvy Dumbo Octopus on a mission to tell the world about the importance of the deep ocean. Molly wants to use Zack’s apartment as her global communications headquarters, but Zack is skeptical. To win Zack over, Molly takes him to her deep ocean home in the Gulf of Mexico to see its unique features and diverse marine life, and to help him understand how human activities threaten its health. The series has screened at over 30 film festivals around the world, winning multiple awards.

ECOGIG’s Ocean Discovery Camp has been hosted in partnership with The University of Georgia’s Summer Academy for five summers and offers a unique virtual approach to marine science and ocean conservation issues. Each day offers a different ocean-related theme and is filled with tons of aquatic fun (including field trips) designed to promote scientific literacy and understanding of the role that healthy oceans play in conservation. Campers (ages 11-14) explore a number of topics and gain new appreciation for the ocean and its ecosystems through hands-on projects, crafts, games, videos and photo slideshows. The topics covered include the ways used to explore the deep oceans, amazing ocean ecosystems, chemosynthetic processes and communities and threats to our oceans such as plastic pollution, oil spills and climate change. In 2020, Ocean Discovery Camp was offered entirely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We still had a very successful camp, with 13 campers attending from all around the United States.

Research Highlights

               As of June 30, 2020, this project’s research resulted in 95 publications, including 10 Book Chapters and 85 peer-reviewed journal articles, 190 scientific presentations, and 136 datasets submitted to the GoMRI Information and Data Cooperative (GRIIDC), which are/will be made available to the public. The project engaged 27 PhD students and 9 Masters students over its award period. Significant outcomes of the project’s research are highlighted below.

A core of ECOGIG’s mission was to track the fate of oil and gas discharged during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, to assess the ecosystem impacts of that discharge, and to evaluate the spatial and temporal trajectories of recovery. We found that the microbial communities metabolizing oil and gas responded rapidly – within days to weeks – to the hydrocarbon infusion. The biomass of methane oxidizing bacteria increased quickly, with methane oxidation activity peaking in July but decreasing thereafter. Physical dispersion of the methane-rich plume muted methane oxidation activity after July 2010 but also distributed methanotroph biomass widely across the system, leading to a surprising increase in baseline rates of methanotrophy that persisted for almost four years after the blowout. The abundance of oil oxidizing bacteria likewise increased rapidly and returned to a community that was similar at the class level by July 2011. However, assessment of microbial ecotypes in 2011 showed that community composition was quite different at the species level, making it difficult to assess whether microbial function returned to the pre-Deepwater Horizon baseline.

Using sophisticated technology to achieve an in situ presence, ECOGIG scientists documented the sedimentation of marine oil snow and constrained the return flux of oil to the benthos at natural seeps. In addition to the sediment trap and marine snow camera work, sediment cores collected between 2010 and 2013 were used to measure, map, and upscale oil sedimentation rates and patterns, advancing the understanding of the fate of Macondo oil in the Gulf system. Furthermore, the sedimented oil data were used to guide and inform ECOGIG’s work on deep seafloor repercussions of oil sedimentation on microbial communities and animals. Benthic microbial activity and community composition were altered by oil sedimentation as was the health of several species of deepwater coral. We mapped and evaluated the impact of oil sedimentation on deepwater corals and modeled the response trajectory of these vital deepsea animals, revealing significant damage to coral populations and showing that their recovery will occur very slowly, over many decades.

We found that the chemical dispersants used in oil spill response can reduce the efficacy of oil oxidation by microorganisms in deep waters and in surface waters. Nutrient or substrate limitation and environmental stressors, such as temperature, may interact synergistically to exacerbate the negative impact of dispersants on microbial populations. Similarly, the interaction of temperature and dispersant exposure regulates the response of deepwater corals to dispersant exposure.

One of the most important lessons from the Deepwater Horizon spill involved the range of time scales over which different components of the Gulf system responded and recovered. Oil and gas from the Deepwater Horizon were barely detectable in the water column using routine chemical forensics (GC-MS) after a year but petrocarbon was easily traceable in the pelagic system for ~five years using radiocarbon. In sediments, petrocarbon lingered and microbial metabolism rates were low to zero, suggesting that this carbon will just as likely be buried as remineralized.

 Proposal Abstract - RFP-IV PI Samantha Joye