Florence Schubotz

In fall 2007 I had opportunity to visit the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the USA which is one of the leading oceanographic institutions in the world. With support from GLOMAR and my supervisor in Germany, Kai-Uwe Hinrichs, I worked in the lab of Chris Reddy for two months. During this time I learned new techniques and applied them on samples that I am analyzing for my PhD thesis. My PhD project focuses on identifying and quantifying the hydrocarbon turnover at different cold seep settings. One of my study areas is located in the southern Gulf of Mexico, where seepage and deposition of very heavy oil, termed as asphalt volcanism, is nurturing an active cold seep ecosystem. My aim is to investigate the geochemical composition of different asphalt and oil samples in order to better understand the phenomenon of asphalt volcanism and its role for the ecosystem. Chris Reddy and his colleagues at WHOI are experts in research related to oil spills and their natural bioremediation and are ideal collaboration partners for this project. Their laboratory facility is equipped with state-of-the-art instruments especially designed to analyze complex mixtures of petroleum hydrocarbons. For the analysis of my samples I used a comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatograph coupled to a time-of-flight mass spectrometer. This instrument resolves an order of magnitude more peaks than traditional GC methods and facilitates the identification of unknown compounds. The processing and interpretation, however, is very time-consuming; to be most efficient I used my stay at WHOI to produce data which I am currently analyzing back in Bremen. I hope to continue the collaboration with Chris Reddy and his colleagues in order target the most promising samples with a more specific analysis which will enable the quantification of biological vs. physical alteration processes of the asphalts.


Working with Chris Reddy and his colleagues Todd Ventura and Bob Nelson has been a wonderful experience for me and I learned so much from their long-time experience. Furthermore the interaction with other students and scientist at WHOI has been very close and I always felt very welcome. I can only recommend highly a stay at WHOI to anyone.
After my fruitful visit to WHOI I had the chance to visit Stuart Wakeham at the Skidaway Insitute of Oceanography in Savannah, Georgia. He is one of my thesis committee members and I am collaborating closely with him and his PostDoc Courtney Turich on several projects. For two weeks we worked intensively together on a project which tries to unravel the microbial composition of the water column of the Black Sea.

My stay abroad has not only provided me with data important for the success of my PhD thesis, but has also been an invaluable experience for me personally and for my future scientific career.