Project: Collaborative Research: Chemical and microbiological studies of water-soluble alkanes in the ocean

NSF Abstract:
This research project addresses the fate of hydrocarbons that enter the ocean, using geological oil seeps as a natural scientific laboratory.  The key issues of intellectual merit that will be addressed focus on the development and application of methodology to determine how the chemical properties of hydrocarbon molecules dictate whether they will be trapped in the ocean's interior or find their way to the atmosphere.  The research will further follow the fate of these molecules in the ocean's interior, determining how the ocean's bacterial population responds, and the extent to which responding bacteria will degrade these molecules. The broader impacts of this research will include the training of undergraduate and graduate students in scientific research and at-sea oceanographic training, as well as the dissemination of findings to policy makers striving to understand the fate and effects of hydrocarbons in the ocean.

Hydrocarbons enter the ocean through a combination of natural seepage, anthropogenic discharge and biological production, with profound impacts on ocean biogeochemistry, ecology, and the atmosphere. This research project addresses the chemical and biological processes affecting water-soluble alkanes in the ocean, using natural seeps to study their fluxes, partitioning between ocean and atmosphere, and the bacterial response to their input.  The intellectual merit of this research pertains to the behavior of highly volatile hydrocarbons, a class that is abundant in petroleum reservoirs and many crude and refined products, but is poorly understood in the ocean.  Volatile hydrocarbons display distinct behaviors compared with traditional oil in that they will partition to seawater or the atmosphere depending on their molecular structure and the context by which they enter the ocean, a combination of characteristics unsuitable for traditional fate and transport models that govern our understanding of liquid oil. This research project addresses this gap in knowledge through a plan to study volatile, water-soluble hydrocarbons in the context of natural seepage, focusing on key questions about their transport and fate, and the ocean's microbial response. Two key questions include:  1) What factors control the partitioning of water-soluble alkanes between water and the atmosphere at natural seeps, and how does this affect their availability to microbes?  2)  What genomic and metabolic factors enable the microbial response to the input of water-soluble alkanes and how does the microbial response vary with regional oceanographic and geologic factors such as proximity to and flux from natural seepage?  The hypotheses that result from these questions will be tested through a series of oceanographic and laboratory-based experiments designed around natural oil seeps in the Pacific and in the Gulf of Mexico. The results of these studies promise to inform our understanding of the transport, fate, and effects of water-soluble alkanes in the ocean.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.