Environmental Science Professor Among Elite Group Studying Asphalt Volcanoes

Dr. Ian MacDonald, (sitting) professor of environmental science, was among an elite group of international scientists who recently returned from a month-long expedition to the Gulf of Mexico’s “Deep Slope” to study asphalt volcanoes deeper than 1,000 meters.

The team, which included geologists, geochemists, microbiologists, physiologists and ecologists from the United States, France, Germany and Austria, revisited several recently discovered sites as well as four previously unexplored sites to collect data on these hydrocarbon seep communities that will provide more information on the growth of deep seep animals and how their communities change over time.

Their mission was to provide essential information on ecological biodiversity to regulator agencies and energy companies that are expanding their exploration for oil and gas reserves to deeper water. All the sites studied were located in areas where energy companies plan to drill for oil and gas in the future.

MacDonald is an expert in deep-sea ecology whose ongoing work on natural gas and oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico has provided vital new information about asphalt deposits in the Campeche offshore oil fields off the coast of Mexico. He was assisted by Oscar Garcia, a Ph.D. candidate in the Coastal and Marine System Science program at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.