Dorothea Altorfer, wife of one of our faculty members, created an event at the Fete de la Nature in Arnaudville, LA
Professor Leads Gulf Expedition
Fri, 07/10/2015 - 2:59pmNatalia Sidorovskaia, Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Physics, has just returned from a successful 10-day Gulf of Mexico expedition onboard LUMCON R/V Pelican. She led a team of 14 scientists as the LADC-GEMM consortium director. LADC-GEMM is one of the twelve consortia recently funded by BP/GOMRI to study long-term environmental impact of the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The research team deployed five deep water moorings and a Seaglider in the vicinity of the Deep Water Horizon incident site. Both platforms will collect passive acoustic data for several months. The data will be later used by the LADC-GEMM scientists to continue monitoring the long-term effects of the 2010 oil spill on deep-diving marine mammals (dolphins, sperm whales, and beaked whales). During the field operations LADC-GEMM was also using a real-time acoustic data analysis from arrays towed by two autonomous surface vehicles (C-Worker 6 and C-Enduro). The team is excited to report that they had many visual and acoustic encounters with sperm whales and dolphins in the area. Read more at www.ladcgemm.org
Images Credit: University of Louisiana at Lafayette/Doug Dugas