Assessing the Deepwater Horizon oil spill with the sentry autonomous underwater vehicle

Abstract

This paper reports the Sentry autonomous underwater vehicle and its deployment on two cruises in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The first cruise, in June 2010, coupled Sentry with the TETHYS mass spectrometer to track and localize a subsea hydrocarbon plume at a depth of approximately 1100m going at least 30km from the oil spill site. In December 2010, Sentry mapped and photographed deep-sea biological communities for follow-up observations and sampling with the Alvin manned submersible. These cruises demonstrate how robots and novel sensing technologies contributed to the oil spill assessment and the broader impact of technologies developed for basic research.