The spring and summer of 2017 featured a number of exciting events. In April we welcomed Dr. Alexey Portnov to the research group. Alexey is from Prof. Jurgen Mienert’s group at the Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate (CAGE) in Norway nad he joins us at Ohio State to work on the methane hydrates project in the Gulf of Mexico. Two outstanding undergraduate students (Brandi Lenz and Nick Rodgers) defended their theses and graduated. Nick will be pursuing graduate school at the University of Minnesota and Brandi will be pursuing a PhD here at Ohio State.
In May, Derek traveled to Texas A&M to present at the Environmental Protection and Safety Panel for the International Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) on behalf of the proponent team for Expedition 386 to study gas hydrate systems in the Gulf of Mexico. Prof. Ann Cook and Dr. Alexey Portnov participated in a drilling expedition to Green Canyon Block 955.
In June, Trevor Browning successfully passed his PhD candidacy exams, and several faculty and graduate students from Ohio State presented at the 9th International Conference on Gas Hydrates in Denver, Colorado.
In July, Derek, Trevor, and Paul traveled to St. Croix and St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands to collect sediment cores and multibeam data (pictures below). We also hosted Prof. Joel Johnson from the University of New Hampshire to split, describe, and subsample sediment cores collected on the coring expedition that took place in May.
