“The oil accident in the Gulf of Mexico with the oil rig Deepwater Horizon is one of the biggest oil disasters in history. More than 4.9 million barrels crude oil has leaked into the ocean and will for many years to come present an environmental disaster. Contrary to earlier theories, however, the oil is not only present on the surface, but also in great volumes both in the water column and on the seafloor. This may in part be contributable to the use of dispersing agents, but a lot indicates that we do not know enough about how oil behaves in water and interacts with it, when the oil leak occurs at such great depths as is the case with Deepwater Horizon. An oil leak in Arctic regions will most likely have even greater catastrophic consequences than is presently seen in the Gulf of Mexico and thus reveal the need to have efficient methods to detect leaks and map the occurrence of oil in the water column if leaks occur.
The vision of the project is based on the development of a model for oil contaminated sea water to develop state-of-the-art art sonar products with an efficient method of detecting oil in the water column.”
Heads of project: Prof. Georgios Kontogeorgis, gk@kt.dtu.dk ,
Prof. Klaus Mosegaard
PhD student: Angeliki Xenaki: anxe@space.dtu.dk
PhD: Xiaodong Liang, xlia@kt.dtu.dk