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| Titel |
Seawater capacitance – a promising proxy for mapping and characterizing drifting hydrocarbon plumes in the deep ocean |
| VerfasserIn |
J. C. Wynn, J. A. Fleming |
| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| ISSN |
1812-0784
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| Digitales Dokument |
URL |
| Erschienen |
In: Ocean Science ; 8, no. 6 ; Nr. 8, no. 6 (2012-12-18), S.1099-1104 |
| Datensatznummer |
250006020
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 copernicus.org/os-8-1099-2012.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Hydrocarbons released into the deep ocean are an
inevitable consequence of natural seep, seafloor drilling, and leaking
wellhead-to-collection-point pipelines. The Macondo 252 (Deepwater Horizon)
well blowout of 2010 was even larger than the Ixtoc event in the Gulf of
Campeche in 1979. History suggests it will not be the last accidental
release, as deepwater drilling expands to meet an ever-growing demand. For
those who must respond to this kind of disaster, the first line of action
should be to know what is going on. This includes knowing where an oil plume
is at any given time, where and how fast it is moving, and how it is
evolving or degrading. We have experimented in the laboratory with induced
polarization as a method to track hydrocarbons in the seawater column and
find that finely dispersed oil in seawater gives rise to a large distributed
capacitance. From previous sea trials, we infer this could potentially be
used to both map and characterize oil plumes, down to a ratio of less than
0.001 oil-to-seawater, drifting and evolving in the deep ocean. A side
benefit demonstrated in some earlier sea trials is that this same approach
in modified form can also map certain heavy placer minerals, as well as
communication cables, pipelines, and wrecks buried beneath the seafloor. |
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