Happy Memorial Day.  Today we’ve been trying to trace the deepwater plume as close as possible to the leaking wellhead.  Finally, after about 14 hours of searching and 5 unsuccessful CTD casts, we closed in on the source of the plume.  After a very long day, we finally have this feature well constrained.  We found more visible oil in the deepwater today – at different sites from yesterday – which increases our confidence in this finding.

One of the strangest things about these deepwater plumes we’ve been tracking is that we see a strong CDOM signal but there’s been no visible oil in the deepwater.  That changed today: we saw oil in the deepwater. 

Sleep is a luxury at sea.  You don’t want to miss anything so you better stay awake.  We’re heading towards some new stations to the North of ground zero and will be doing a hexagonal grid around ground zero tonight in search of additional plumes.

Lesson number 1: Never report that things are going smoothly at sea.

Today we saw some new things around the area. A fleet of skimmer ships was doing a surface burn to reduce the size of an oil slick. We were a couple of miles away from the burn but the large cloud of black smoke caught everyone’s eye. I’m still amazed by the ‘city of ships’ around the spill site. The rigs drilling the relief wells and the ‘siphon’ ship (large ship to the left in photo), as well as many support vessels are visible in this shot.