By Jeffry Scott
Cox Newspapers
ATLANTA – It’s the most unlikely place to unlock the mysteries of an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: a landlocked lab in Athens at the University of Georgia, a school better known for crop, not marine science.
But from the UGA lab, Samantha Joye – and a team of UGA researchers, and scientists from the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – generated headlines around the world when they reported the Gulf oil spill may be worse than it appears.
Joye, a professor of marine sciences, said observations and preliminary results based on seabed core samples and water samples taken from a site a mile beneath the surface and nine miles from the Deepwater Horizon spill show it may be worse than expected.