On the trail of deep-sea oil

STENNIS SPACE CENTER, Miss. — The deep-sea photos on Vernon Asper’s laptop don’t look like much to the untrained eye: black squares with flecks of white and orange. But, he says, pressing a fingertip beneath one barely-there dot, that sure looks like oil to him.

Asper, a professor of marine science at the University of Southern Mississippi, will know more once he finishes analyzing data being collected by a deep-diving vessel built by iRobot Corp. in Bedford. The torpedo-shaped vessel, Seaglider 515, and several other seafaring robots are sliding through the Gulf of Mexico, assessing the oil in the water after a rig explosion off the Louisiana coast created a gusher that has turned into the nation’s worst environmental disaster.

Scientists will use the information gathered by the underwater gliders to map the oil swirling hundreds and thousands of feet beneath the ocean’s surface, and that will help them figure out how the oil is moving and where it might appear next. The information, collected with onboard sensors, is critical so cleanup crews can buffer the coast and know where to look for harmed wildlife. Government officials and researchers estimate that as much as 40,000 barrels of oil a day may have been leaking from the blown-out well drilled for BP, making it much bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.

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Article courtesy of The Boston Globe By Erin Ailworth