Texas A&M professor of oceanography, John Kessler, spoke at the Clara B. Mounce Public Library Tuesday in Bryan about the research he and his team worked on at the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The National Science Foundation funded the 10-day cruise, which began June 10. The team was consisted of David Valentine, professor at U. California-Santa Barbara, and graduate students from Texas A&M, Texas A&M-Galveston and the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Kessler is a chemical oceanographer in the college of geosciences, and after receiving a lead from Valentine, that nearly half of what was coming out of the oil well was methane, Kessler submitted a proposal.

“We put together a team and our equipment in two weeks, which normally takes six to eight months,” Kessler said.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that has 20 times the warming potential of carbon monoxide. The goal of Kessler’s team was to determine where the methane was going and what it was doing to the local environment.

During an environmental disaster 55 million years ago, similar events were taking place. Large amounts of methane were erupting from the ocean floor, and Kessler suggests that the methane affected the global climate change. Investigating the oil spill sight presented an opportunity to test his hypothesis.

“The fact that this is happening now allows us to make lemonade out of a lemon that’s occurring from the spill, and we can learn more about our environment and how it functions,” Kessler said.

With the use of the latest and most up-to-date technology — which was donated companies who wanted to show their support of such a high media profile event — Kessler’s team was able to gather a large amount of data to bring back.  They are still analyzing and researching their findings.

Working on as little as three hours of sleep every night, the team of researchers worked around the clock gathering samples from the surface and the depths of the water. Samples were collected from areas of water ranging from five miles outside of the leaking oil well, all the way to within 500 meters of ground zero.

Kessler said it was an experience he will remember forever and feels lucky to have been able to be apart of such a monumental event.