Whole Living Awards: Samantha Joye, the Scientist

For the first

Whole Living Awards

, we’re honoring eco-heroines who pour their passion into turning our blue marble green — including the winner featured here.

Who


Samantha Joye, 45

Eco Achievement


Sounding the alarm on the Gulf oil spill’s impact on marine life

In a walk-in cooler in the department of marine sciences at the University of Georgia-Athens, several hundred sediment samples await analysis inside tall plastic cylinders. Cored from the chilly depths of the Gulf of Mexico, the samples contain layer upon layer of biogeochemical information. The room looks antiseptic, its contents orderly.

But today, to the horror of a toiling grad student, a cylinder plug has slipped open and gobs of viscous black muck are slowly seeping out. The room smells like an auto repair shop. These cores are no backlog of basic research: They were collected from the site of BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout by Samantha Joye, a world-renowned biogeochemist who has made a career of studying the impact of oil on seawater.

Joye, 45, was at her office when the rig exploded on April 20 of last year. “All of us who knew anything about the oil industry knew that this was far worse than anyone was saying,” she says.

A small-boned woman with a wide, expressive mouth, Joye hunches over her desk, swaddled in black fleece. Her office walls are covered with photographs of her husband, a mathematical modeler at the university, and their 3-year-old daughter, and with oceanographic maps and other documentary evidence of her fascination with the sea.

In the weeks following the explosion, Joye helped coordinate the waterborne efforts of researchers from several universities. What these scientists discovered would help shape the debate over the future of deepwater drilling in the Gulf.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deepwater region,” Joye told the New York Times. Methane concentrations were 100 to 10,000 times above normal, she told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Almost overnight, remarks such as these made Joye the media’s go-to scientist for quotes that contradicted the government’s and BP’s estimates of the spill size, its potential impact on sea life, and how much oil remained in the Gulf.

The oxygen depletion was alarming, Joye said in an interview. “It’s impossible to fathom the impact of the spill,” she told the BBC.