November 2007 - Dr. Thomas Naehr, an associate professor of Geology and Environmental Science in the University’s College of Science and Technology, gave the keynote lecture at the 2007 International Conference on Geological Engineering in Wuhan, China, in October.

Naehr’s presentation centered on the history challenges, and developments in scientific drilling for gas hydrates. His visit is part of a collaborative agreement between Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and China University of Geosciences.

Gas hydrate is an ice-like, solid substance in which water molecules form an open solid lattice that encloses appropriately sized molecules of light. Estimates indicate that gas hydrate deposits may contain more organic carbon than all the world’s non-hydrate hydrocarbon deposits combined. The magnitude of this global storehouse of methane has raised serious inquiry into the possibility of using methane hydrate as a source of energy.

During his academic career, Naehr has sailed on more than a dozen offshore research expeditions, including ODP Leg 164, the first scientific drilling campaign that targeted gas hydrate deposits offshore South Carolina. He has also made extensive use of manned and unmanned submersibles to collect gas hydrate samples from near-seafloor deposits.

November 2007 - Dr. Marion Nipper, a senior research scientist with the Center for Coastal Studies, gave a talk on "Passive Samplers as Sediment Surrogates in Toxicity Tests" at the annual Science Conference of the International Council for Exploration of the Sea (ICES) in Helsinki, Finland.

Her talk was included in the final short list of three best papers at the meeting. The conference was attended by nearly 700 people with more than 250 talks given. Her paper was a result of multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional team work, with co-authors Scott Carr and Jim Biedenbach from the U.S. Geological Survey, and John MacFarlane and Philip Gschwend from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

August 2007 - HRI Research Associate Dr. Ian MacDonald, professor of environmental science, was among an elite group of international scientists who recently returned from a month-long expedition to the Gulf of Mexico’s “Deep Slope” to study asphalt volcanoes deeper than 1,000 meters.

The team, which included geologists, geochemists, microbiologists, physiologists and ecologists from the United States, France, Germany and Austria, revisited several recently discovered sites as well as four previously unexplored sites to collect data on these hydrocarbon seep communities that will provide more information on the growth of deep seep animals and how their communities change over time.

Their mission was to provide essential information on ecological biodiversity to regulator agencies and energy companies that are expanding their exploration for oil and gas reserves to deeper water. All the sites studied were located in areas where energy companies plan to drill for oil and gas in the future.

MacDonald is an expert in deep-sea ecology whose ongoing work on natural gas and oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico has provided vital new information about asphalt deposits in the Campeche offshore oil fields off the coast of Mexico. He was assisted by Oscar Garcia, a Ph.D. candidate in the Coastal and Marine System Science program at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.

August 2007 - HRI Research Associate Dr. Marion Nipper, senior research scientist with the Center for Coastal Studies, is one of three professors who were awarded $264,287 from The Cooperative Institute for Coastal and Estuarine Environmental Technology (CICEET), NOAA, for the evaluation of bioavailability and toxicity of hydrophobic organic compounds (HOCs) in coastal sediments. The evaluation is a collaborative project with Dr. R. Scott Carr, field station leader of the U.S. Geological Survey Marine Ecotoxicology Research Station, and Dr. Phil Gschwend, professor of civil and environmental engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The project will use a state of the science instrument, the Sediment Profile Imaging and Micro-sampling System (SPIMS), recently developed under a prior grant from CICEET, for in situ assessments of sediment quality for the preservation of marine life on the Texas coast.