Actually I am a Professor of Oceanography who has spent much of his life at sea doing a “real” job.
Having said that, the people here who are talking about the deep area of the Gulf of Mexico are right. It has been known for many decades that there are oil seeps, dead zones etc at the bottom of the Gulf. This makes me wonder if they went out looking for a predetermined result (well ... not really).
BTW, I know a lot of oceanographers, and I have absolutely no idea who this person (Samantha Joye) is. I will say that oceanography at Georgia is not exactly one of their strong points.
Dr. Samantha Joye is a professor in the department of marine sciences in the University of Georgia’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. She is an expert in the cycling of nutrients, metals, and organic materials between the living and non-living components of the ecosystem (a field known as biogeochemistry) in coastal environments; and in ecosystem and geochemical modeling; microbial ecology, metabolism and physiology.
Dr. Joye’s research has been widely published in leading scientific journals, and she is regularly called upon by national and international scientific and policy agencies for expert commentary. Her work has been funded by substantial, multi-year grants from the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among other funders.
In 2008 she was awarded the university’s Creative Research Medal for her work assessing the impacts of climate change on biological and geological processes, particularly those involving carbon, in coastal ecosystems. One of her research projects on the Georgia coast showed for the first time that even small changes in temperature affect the efficiency of super-sensitive microbes that degrade organic carbon in coastal ocean areas. Another project is determining how the rising sea levels caused by climate change may affect coastal wetlands, particularly salt, brackish, and freshwater tidal marshes. Her current research in the Gulf oil spill zone is documenting the distribution of deepwater plumes of oil, measuring the activities of microbes breaking down the oil, and assessing other variables such as dissolved oxygen concentration and other environmental impacts of the spill.
Dr. Joye earned her Ph.D. in Marine Sciences from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1993 and joined the faculty of the University of Georgia in 1997, having serving briefly as a research associate at San Francisco State University and an assistant professor of oceanography at Texas A&M. She was also awarded a fellowship at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, Germany, where she served as a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, in 2002-03. In 1997 and again in 1999, she served as a research fellow in the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.
Source: UGA
www.uga.edu/aboutUGA/joye_pkit/Samantha_Joye_bio.doc
HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT
JUNE 9TH, 2010 Testimony Submitted By Dr. Samantha B. Joye
PDF - 13 Pages
http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/file/Commdocs/hearings/2010/Energy/9jun/Joye_Testimony.pdf
Dr. Samantha Joye
http://www.gulfbase.org/person/view.php?uid=sjoye
Her Gulf Oil Blog started in May
http://gulfblog.uga.edu/page/3/