CARTHE

Nice to see our drifter pictured on the cover of the 10-year summary. We had missed our drifter. With that, that is a wrap folks! Good bye from CARTHE 🥰🌺

CARTHE was created to bring researchers together to study ocean circulation in hopes of better understanding and predicting how currents transport pollutants. This synthesis paper by CARTHE scientists takes a look at just how far we have come since DWH and how our tools can be used moving forward.

Advances in Observing and Understanding Small-Scale Open Ocean Circulation During the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative Era Predicting the distribution of oil, buoyant plastics, flotsam, and marine organisms near the ocean surface remains a fundamental problem of practical importance. This manuscript synthesizes progress in this area during the time of the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI; 2012–2019), with an ...

10 years ago today, the Deepwater Horizon disaster claimed the lives of 11 people and spilled 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, CARTHE scientists have been tirelessly studying the movement of oil and other pollutants in groundbreaking ways. From Louisiana to the Arctic, from laboratory experiments to some of the largest oceanographic field campaigns ever conducted, from high school students to professors, the CARTHE team has been dedicated to advancing our understanding of physical oceanography.
Today we pause to remember how this all began, the impact on our communities and the environment, and all of our accomplishments over the last 10 years.

“Smaller ocean motions are too large to observe in the lab, but too small to observe from space,” explained study author Henry Chang, “This study targets precisely those scales, where material is moved around within minutes to a few hours and across distances of 1 to 100 m.”

Special thanks to the hundreds of students who helped paint plates!

Study Shows that Floating Bamboo Plates Capture Strength of Small-Scale Ocean Currents | GoMRI Researchers optically tracked 600 biodegradable bamboo plates floating in the Gulf of Mexico for 2.5 hours to better understand how small-scale currents (scales of minutes and meters) affect surface dispersion.

The word cloud of 195 CARTHE publications!

The mystery of the Brazil oil spill is being resolved.

Following up on a discovery made by Professor Humberto Barbosa of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, SkyTruth has looked further into the mysterious slick which appeared 54 km off the coast of southern Bahia, Brazil on October 28th in a Sentinel-1 Radar image. Looking through 58 Sentinel-1 images dating back to November 1st, 2018 in this exact location, SkyTruth was unable to detect evidence of a repeat occurrence of the slick. Wind readings at the time of the scene show consistent gusts from the east-northeast, suggesting that this slick came from a moving vessel. It's also worth noting that we don't see any offshore infrastructure, such as oil platforms or FPSOs, in this area; the slick doesn't appear to originate from a fixed point source. The slick is comparable in size to the long, oily slicks from vessels illegally discharging untreated bilge that we've observed in other parts of the world.

This finding comes amidst weeks of response to an ongoing environmental crisis on beaches stretching far up Brazil's northeast coast, with clumpy oil polluting the region's otherwise pristine beaches. The cause of this disaster has yet to be determined, but SkyTruth will continue to comb through imagery in hopes that the truth will be illuminated.