Christopher Reddy Talks About the Long-Term Effects of Oil Spills
Special Topic of Oil Spills Interview, November 2010
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How helpful was it to have such a well-documented spill so close to your laboratory?
When I go to meetings and meet other scientists trying to work on research grants and projects, doing the logistics for going on research cruises, trying to get research time on these ships, being away from their families for weeks, I think about how lucky I've been.
I had this living natural laboratory right here, which was documented originally by some of the best scientists in the world, and it's five minutes away from where I live. I can do the research, get a cup of coffee; I don't have to worry about ship schedules or visas. I had the perfect laboratory and it didn't cost me a cent. I had an epiphany: "Wow, this is great. I can do a lot of interesting research on questions that transcend regular oil spills and do it on my own schedule with minimal cost."
And now my advice to every scientist is to try to find a local project because there's a saying in oceanography, "there are no Walmarts in the middle of the ocean." You wait 18 months to get on an ocean cruise, you get to the middle of the ocean and a part breaks and if you don't have a replacement, you're doomed. You sit there for 10 days without work. It's miserable. If a part breaks on a local project, you don't have to worry about it. Go buy a new one. So, yes, that was really lucky for me. I've lived a gilded life.
What is it about your findings from this 1969 spill that makes it so highly cited?
Two things. One is that the paper shows that oil can last for a long time in the environment. The second is that it was, for all practical purposes—and this is my opinion—the first time that a technique called comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography was used to address a real-world problem. So people cite it for that as well.
Is it common to find oil lasting that long in the environment?
Not too many studies have actually looked. What was interesting to us was when that first paper came out, just by chance once again, somebody mentioned that there was another spill in 1974 that occurred a mile north from the spill we'd been studying. And the idea was that maybe we should see if oil persists there.
The next thing you know we were at Winsor Cove, studying this 1974 spill and it was surprisingly different. We did find oil, but what we found at the 1969 site was that despite the oil, the salt marsh had rebounded. At least visually, it looked pretty good. On some days it could look like picture for a Cape Cod post card.
At Winsor Cove, the marsh grasses never came back. These marsh grasses act like rebar in concrete; they keep the peat or mud in place and because the grasses never came back strong at Winsor Cove, it led to significant erosion. That marsh really did a poor job of rebounding.
We took pictures. We noticed the extent of the erosion because we were out there looking at a photographic slide made in 1974 and there was this huge boulder in the middle of the salt marsh. We put the slide down and we realized we could barely see the big boulder because it was almost completely under water. "Holy cow, the marsh has changed a lot," we thought.
"...with this Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf, I
just had to get involved."
Photo by Sean Sylva.
This is unpublished work. We haven't written this up yet, but we got our hands on lots of aerial photos, and we looked at areas with and without oil spills, and we can statistically demonstrate that areas with oil suffer more significant erosion than areas without.
Your other most-cited paper has an intriguing name: "Resolving the unresolved complex mixture in petroleum-contaminated sediments," (Frysinger GS, et al., Environ. Sci. Technol. 37: 1653-62, 2003). What did this paper find and what does that title mean?
That was a follow-up to this 2002 paper in many respects, but it was much more of an analytical chemistry paper. This work was done with my colleagues Rich Gaines and Glenn Frysinger at the United States Coast Guard Academy. To understand what we were doing you have to go way back to the way oil gets formed. It does so through the cooking and squeezing of organic matter, of plant debris, and the end result is many, many compounds. In some respects, it's a kind of Gaussian distribution of molecules.
When you try to analyze those chemicals with traditional techniques, many of these compounds have such similar properties that they're not resolved on a typical gas chromatograph. It was actually my Ph.D. advisor and his first graduate student, John Farington, who coined the phrase "unresolved complex mixture," which means a mixture of petroleum hydrocarbons that looks like a big hump, instead of the nice sharp lines you'd expect from a chromatograph.
What we did was use this comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography technique I mentioned to tease apart and make those compounds separated. So we could have a much more refined inventory of what compounds existed in these contaminated sites, so we resolved the unresolved complex mixture.
It's cited a lot because it showed that if you worked hard enough you could separate out a lot more compounds from that oil, compounds that would otherwise be just pushed aside. And what made the paper exciting for us is that we were not just separating out all these compounds, but showing that they could be used as potential tracers.
Every oil compound has a little bit different behavior than every other one. So the more compounds you can identify, the greater possibility you have to learn about environmental processes. This was a bit of a step forward in being able to shed light on, say, how much oil is evaporating compared with how much is dissolving in water compared with how much is actually biodegraded—things like that.
You just recently published a paper in Science on the Gulf Oil spill. Have you been working on spills all this time or had you transitioned into something else?
Funny thing about oil spills, I don't know if you remember The Godfather Part III, when Michael Corleone says "just when I thought I got out, they pull me back in." Well, with this Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf, I just had to get involved. There aren't that many professionally trained people in academia who study oil spills in the US and who actually understand the chemistry of oil spills. So I had to get involved. I had to. I could easily see myself writing 10 papers on it. The first one came out in Science last month, and it was a really solid effort. I'm writing another as we speak.
But before this spill I was working a lot on biofuels—how algae and other natural products can make biofuels and also polymers. I have a couple of provisional patents on this, and I was just about ready to devote myself to it. My institution was just about ready to build, with me as the lead, a very large greenhouse to start growing algae. The idea is that we can then extract out the compounds of interest and see which ones can be used for fuel and which ones for polymers.
I'm still working on that, but I now have a lot of spill work that has to be put to bed. I'm still looking forward to transitioning out of the spill world in the next one to three years and putting most of my efforts into biofuels and algae. It's the next big step for me. My Ph.D. advisor actually trained his students first to be lipid chemists before pollution chemists.
So that's where I was going when this spill happened. I was spending day and night working on the design for this greenhouse, talking to architects, all sorts of things, and the spill came along. I'll get back to it. I still have a full-time technician working on it, but I haven't thought about it much in any scholarly way in the last three or four months.
Christopher M. Reddy, Ph.D.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole, MA, USA
Visit Christopher M. Reddy at the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution.
CHRISTOPHER M. REDDY'S MOST CURRENT MOST-CITED PAPER IN ESSENTIAL SCIENCE INDICATORS:
Gustafsson O, et al., "Evaluation of a protocol for the quantification of black carbon in sediments," Global Biogeochem. Cycle 15(4): 881-90, December 2001 with 119 cites. Source: Essential Science Indicators from Clarivate.
KEYWORDS: POLLUTANTS, OIL SPILLS, CALIBRATION, INSTRUMENTS, ANALYSIS, DRINKING WATER, 1996 RHODE ISLAND SPILL, 1969 WEST FALMOUTH SPILL, LONG-TERM EFFECTS, CHEMICAL COMPOSITION, ANAEROBIC SEDIMENTS, BIODEGRADABILITY, COMPREHENSIVE TWO-DIMENSIONAL GAS CHROMATOGRAPHY, 1974 WINDSOR COVE SPILL, OIL COMPOUNDS, TRACERS, BIOFUELS, ALGAE, 2010 GULF OF MEXICO SPILL.
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Photo credit/permission
Photo 1 (page 1 introduction) by Carl Sevin.
Photo 2 (page 1 in table) by Chris Reddy.
Photo 3 (page 2 in table) by Sean Sylva.