What's Going On At The Bottom Of The Gulf

Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

NEAL CONAN, host:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

The president is expected to speak at a news conference a little later this hour. When he does, we'll join him. The issues are expected to include the tax cut deal and WikiLeaks.

But first, most of us spent Thanksgiving with family, friends and a steadily diminishing turkey. NPR's science correspondent was in the Gulf of Mexico to look for the oil from the BP spill. The well itself was finally capped a few months ago, but not before more than four million barrels of crude gushed into the water.

Richard went along with scientists who believe that much of that oil sank to the bottom of the sea, and they brought along the famous mini-sub Alvin to go half a mile down to the bottom and take a look.

If you'd like to know what they found there at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, what it looks like, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.

Richard Harris, kind enough to join us here in Studio 3A. Welcome home.

RICHARD HARRIS: Thank you very much.

CONAN: And what did you find at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico?

HARRIS: We found, well, depending upon where we looked, on my particular dive, we found a fairly thin layer of brown material that was sitting on the bottom. In some places it looked thicker and fluffy, like cottage cheese - but still brown. And I also saw it smeared all over a beautiful old, maybe 500-year-old sea fan, and it was a coral that was apparently killed by this brown material.

Exactly what that material is is still being investigated right now. Clearly, it wasn't there before the oil spill, as far as biologists studying in the Gulf say they've never seen something like this before.

It's probably - almost certainly not pure oil, however. Oil has had a chance to get digested by microbes and sea life. There's probably some oil, though, still in it. It's clearly - the carbon in that material almost certainly came from the BP well. But exactly what the material is remains to be figured out in a lab.

CONAN: So you were out on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico, what, about 10 miles away from the Macondo Well, which was the source of the spill?

HARRIS: That's correct. We were on the research vessel Atlantis, which is the mother ship for the Alvin, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And a couple days after Thanksgiving, I actually did dive about 10 miles from the oil well. Subsequent dives and other samples were taken much closer. We went right past, practically right over the site of the oil spill and took samples from there as well, off of the Atlantis, and also the Alvin did as well.

And there, this mud layer, which sort of looks like chocolate pudding, was a couple of inches thick when they brought up these core samples. And we looked at it in the laboratory aboard the ship. The organisms in the mud had been killed off by this, either because they were maybe suffocated by the material, or possibly there's toxic materials within this brown, mucky layer, but worms that tried to get, you know, tried to get out were just essentially unable to keep surviving in that brown guck.

CONAN: There are any number of other sea creatures that then feed on those worms, no?

HARRIS: That's true. It's a complicated story and a complicated ecosystem because I should also mention that we saw fish that looked like they were doing just fine and shrimp and so on. We saw - so organisms that live above the sea floor, depending upon how dependent upon they were on life under the sea floor, were maybe doing better.

Some of the crabs looked sickly to Samantha Joye, who is one of the scientists from the University of Georgia, who was actually the leader of this expedition. We actually ended up capturing one of those crabs, and she's taking it back to a laboratory to have it examined more closely.

But it was a female crab that had - where you'd sort of expect to see eggs wrapped around under her tail, it was some sort of strange, brown material. So these were crabs that were discolored and had bumps on them, and they were - they did not look like happy campers.

CONAN: How long does this chemical analysis of this chocolate pudding take?

HARRIS: It'll probably take a couple of months, based on what we saw last time. Because Samantha Joye was out here in September, and she was taking core samples of this mud at the time, and those results came back just essentially as she was heading out to sea again in November.

CONAN: So we've heard any number of explanations for what happened to those millions of barrels of crude oil that gushed into the water. Some of it was evaporated, the lighter materials. Some of it was, we are told, eaten by bacteria.

HARRIS: Yes, and this is potentially evidence that some of it was eaten by bacteria. The one scenario for where this brown guck came from was that the oil saturated the water, and there are oil-eating bacteria out there, and they consumed some of it, and then sort of - if you can think of an algae bloom causing sometimes serious problems in bays, you could sort of think of this an oil bloom, as one of the scientists on board told me.

And the bacteria, you know, expanded rapidly. The organisms that eat bacteria expanded rapidly and so rapidly that some of, you know, some of their fecal material may have ended up on the sea floor, some of their skeletons could have ended up, and their bodies, if they were killed by this sort of gorging of oil. And that may be a significant fraction of this brown guck.

CONAN: We know that there are oil-eating bacteria there because oil seeps naturally out of the floor, the sea floor at the Gulf of Mexico. There's lots of places it does, and that's what they do: They've evolved to eat that oil. But this was a - well, they had a very large Thanksgiving dinner, so to speak.

HARRIS: Yes. We went to one of these natural seeps. Actually, I dived near one of these natural seeps. And possibly over 20,000 years, one of the scientists estimated, maybe this seep, which has been around that long, may have produced as much oil as came out of the BP well in a couple of months.

So yes, they are adapted to oil, some organisms, but they're certainly not adapted to dealing with an enormous quantity all at once. And that's one of the fundamental questions that they're trying to figure out here: How well can these natural systems respond to it? How much can we just count on Mother Nature to take care of this for us? And how much are we actually killing some of these organisms that we are turning to and hoping to clean up the mess for us?

CONAN: We're talking with NPR science correspondent Richard Harris. Again, in about, oh, eight minutes or so, the president is expected to come out to hold a news conference in the White House Briefing Room. Again, the issues are likely to include the tax cut deal with Republicans and WikiLeaks, among other things. So stay tuned for that.

But in the meantime, if you'd like to know what Richard and the scientists saw at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Dan(ph) is on the line from Sarasota in Florida.

DAN (Caller): Hi. I'm wondering that in your lab tests, whether you can re-create the conditions and the pressures at the bottom of the ocean. And is there a way to test that oil dispersant mixing with the oil and whether the pressures change the way it reacts with the oil. And maybe that's what you get down there.

HARRIS: That's an excellent question. I think that there is a great deal of interest among the scientists on board about how much of this material might actually be the result of the dispersants that were used. These are chemicals that break up oil and may have kept a lot of the oil off the shoreline, but it almost certainly kept a lot of the oil in the water. And the dispersants themselves are toxic.

So there's a critical question about, you know, is this brown muck maybe partially dispersant, and they don't know. I think the lab tests are not so much trying to re-create this as to understand what are the constituents of this brown muck, how much of it is sort of still recognizable as oily compounds that would've come straight from the well, how much is actually digested carbon that had been, that had already been through numerous digestive systems of marine organisms along the way.

But clearly, the dispersants are of great interest to this group, and...

DAN: And with those, do you think there - or have they tested whether or not those dispersants mixed with the oil might actually prevent the bacteria from digesting the oil, and maybe that's what we've got. Maybe that dispersant mixed with the oil killed the bacteria.

CONAN: Or it just makes it taste bad.

HARRIS: Yeah, an excellent question, an excellent question, and I don't know the answer.

CONAN: Dan, thanks very much for the call, appreciate it.

DAN: Thank you.

CONAN: Do we have any idea how widespread this area of, well, varying from a thin layer of cottage cheese to a thick layer of chocolate pudding, how big this area is?

HARRIS: The - that's also a difficult question to answer because it's spotty. What we discovered, and the scientists on this, is that they found a little bit everywhere they looked, but some places, it was really thick. Some places, it was pretty thin.

We were diving out 10 miles away from the Macondo Well, and it was a thin layer there. There are places - one assumption is that a lot of this could have fallen out wherever the giant, sort of this - oil on the surface of the water fell.

So remember the satellite pictures, that actually flowed pretty far to the north and towards the shores of, you know, Mississippi and Florida and so on, and so - Alabama. So it's possible that - and it's reasonable to expect that some of this oil would have fallen to the sea floor in those areas.

But it's hundreds and hundreds of square miles and maybe thousands of square miles that were under the oil. And the operating assumption, the hypothesis being tested, is that wherever the oil was on the surface, you should probably find it on the bottom.

CONAN: Andrew's(ph) on the line calling from Nashville.

ANDREW (Caller): Yeah, I'm interested to know if we have truly seen the worst. This sounds kind of rosy in some ways, much better than we all anticipated, maybe months ago. But is there a scenario in which we could still see some kind of ecosystem collapse due to this kind of chocolate pudding, as you described it, on the sea floor or other things that are going to ultimately disrupt the ecosystem?

HARRIS: Yeah, well, I think this could be very hard on the organisms that live in the mud on the sea floor, and I think that we shouldn't make - we shouldn't paint a rosy picture of what life is like at the sea floor for those organisms.

I think it remains to be seen what is going to happen elsewhere. I mean, we - you can see large fish right now. What we don't really know about is fish larvae. Fish start out as these tiny little points of life that move around in the sea and grow fairly slowly, and those are susceptible to both poisoning from oil and oil dispersants, as well.

And we simply don't know. Maybe five or 10 years down the road, when we would expect to see a whole new crop of fish, we will discover that the fish larvae that were in the Gulf last spring and summer didn't get a chance to grow.

And so that is - I'm not saying that happened, but if you're asking are there potentially less rosy scenarios, that's certainly a scenario that fisheries biologists are very concerned about, what really is - what is life going to be like. And that includes some tuna and other fish that we care a lot about.

CONAN: Andrew, thanks very much for the call.

ANDREW: Thanks.

CONAN: And Richard, I know you're in the process of producing some pieces that we're going to be hearing later this week on All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

HARRIS: All Things Considered, yeah.

CONAN: And so we'll look forward to that. But tell us what it was like. Not very many of us get to go down into a research submarine that's, what, big enough to fit three people.

HARRIS: Yeah, that's right. It was very cozy. It's cold. It's basically - there's - it's a small space. Three people in there, if you try to stretch out, you're, you know, you're rubbing knees or whatever with one another. It's a space - there are small windows. There are about three windows that are six inches across or something that you can peer out, and there are also cameras.

I spent most of my time looking out the window as opposed to through the cameras, but the cameras brought back all sorts of high-definition video and so on.

And it was - it went remarkably quickly. It was very - I thought, you know, is it going to be scary going a half a mile down under the ocean? And the answer was no. It was remarkably peaceful. It was, you know, the light sort of faded to black, and then we saw these glowing organisms out the windows, these bioluminescent bacteria and so on. And it was just - it was a magical descent. I almost forgot that we were going down sort of to look at the scene of a crime practically, because it was such a mesmerizing experience getting down there.

CONAN: Richard Harris, thanks very much for your time, and again, we'll look forward to pieces further describing your adventures on the sea floor at the Gulf of Mexico, appreciate it.

HARRIS: Happy to be here.

CONAN: NPR science correspondent Richard Harris joined us here in Studio 3A. When we come back, we'll get you ready for the president's news conference. He's scheduled to get under way in just a couple of minutes now. Again, topics will include the agreement yesterday with Republicans on the tax cut extension and also WikiLeaks. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.