During the past 25 years, corporations have plumbed the depths of the Arctic Alaskan mainland for oil, collecting more than 13 billion barrels in the process. More recently, these companies expanded efforts to include offshore drilling. Trefry and his Florida Tech team, Steven Wood, assistant professor of oceanography, Bob Trocine, senior research associate, Robert Rember, research scientist, and graduate students Michelle McElvaine, Lee Frey, and Debra Woodall were funded by the department's Minerals Management Service to learn if this new drilling was causing negative impacts on the environment. Trefry's research has been extensive.
"We analyzed several species of fish, clams and amphipods," said Trefry. "We also studied the water, ice and mud to check for potential pollution." What Trefry's team and their colleagues from Battelle Ocean Sciences, Kinnetics Laboratories, Applied Marine Sciences and the University of Texas Marine Lab discovered through their analyses was a pleasant surprise. "We found early in the process that impacts to the environment from offshore drilling were minimal," Trefry said. "In fact, the entire offshore area was near pristine. During the past four years we've continued to monitor the area and still have no evidence of significant impacts."
After the first year, Trefry reoriented the program from being solely an impact study to one that would investigate the natural oceanographic system of the Alaskan Arctic. Trefry spent much of the next three springs and summers in the area, st
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Contact: Jay Wilson
jowilson@fit.edu
321-674-6218
Florida Institute of Technology
1-Oct-2003