Chemical Oceanography
This group comprises a diverse faculty with numerous cross-disciplinary interests. Work is conducted across groundwater, riverine, estuarine, continental-margin, and open-ocean environments on a variety of projects intended to help us better understand the cycling of organic materials (both natural and anthropogenic) and both major and trace elements.
Individual faculty and students collaborate not only with other groups within the Department, but with the other academic departments at VIMS. There is also increasing interaction with several of the departments and with the newly established Environmental Sciences and Policy cluster on the main campus of the College of William and Mary.
Research Areas
Projects include:
- cycling and diagenesis of dissolved and particulate organic matter in estuaries and open-ocean settings;
- physio-chemical exchanges of organic contaminants across various aqueous and particle interfaces in groundwaters and estuaries; and
- sorptive/desorptive processes controlling the movement and availability of trace metals and organic contaminants in sediment matrices.
Funding
Research funding comes from a variety of sources including the National Science Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Energy, and Office of Naval Research, as well as from the Commonwealth of Virginia for a number of on-going programs related to the marine and environmental sciences.