Sep 12 - McClatchy-Tribune Business News Formerly Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Mike Keller The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.

The research vessel Seward Johnson left the port at Gulfport at midday Monday packed with local scientists and cutting-edge technology to study a seafloor phenomenon still shrouded in mystery.

The 204-foot Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute ship will come to rest 3,000 feet above an area of the seafloor where vents of methane gas release near-constant streams of bubbles, which contribute to the atmospheric gases that drive climate change.

"It's really cutting-edge stuff we're doing here and it's Mississippi people who are doing it," said Vernon Asper, a marine scientist and professor at the University of Southern Mississippi who helped put the voyage together.

But the work to understand global warming is only one reason for the research cruise, which is funded by the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admiistration and the Minerals Management Service. From just below the seafloor to as much as 15,000 feet down, the gas meets with water at very low temperatures and very high pressure, said Bob Woolsey, the senior scientist on the cruise who works at the University of Mississippi.

The result is a compound commonly called gas hydrate, which is a matrix of frozen water encapsulating methane molecules. Gas hydrate creates formations under the seafloor as the methane bubbles up to meet the cold water. The formations may be either a future energy source or a danger to the deep-sea rigs that mine the earth for petroleum.

"Oil companies had part of a rig on the seafloor fail and sink when a hydrate formation turned to gas," Asper said. "That was a real wake-up call to them to understand gas hydrates better. Before understanding them as a potential energy source, we have to understand them as potential hazards."

Normally, the flammable ice is stable. But when conditions change, the compound can quickly turn back to gas and turn the seafloor unstable, said Woolsey.

The ship is headed for an area in federal waters called Mississippi Canyon Block 118, about 80 miles south of Pascagoula. Once it gets to its destination, 20 scientists and 17 crew members will work on the deck to send scientific equipment and a 14-ton submersible vessel to the bottom.

Kevin Martin, a USM graduate student who built an instrument to measure the volume of methane coming out of vents, said the gas comes from deep-sea microbes that digest organic matter coming from the land and ocean above. The same microbes also digest petroleum that seeps up from oil fields below the seafloor.

"It turns out that microbes play a big role down there," Woolsey said. "Microbes produce a slime that speeds up hydrate formation by a factor of 50. It's almost like the microbes are farming the stuff."

This trip, which Woolsey said costs $22,500 a day for the week the ship will be out, is part of a larger project to build a deep-sea hydrates observatory on Block 118.

Hydrates are drawing a lot of attention from oil companies and researchers because of what they may represent: Woolsey said up to 10 percent of the world's hydrocarbon supply may be tied up in hydrate formations.

But aboard the ship is another, less mysterious phenomenon -- researchers from Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Southern Miss all working together. They join researchers from 15 other universities and oceanographic institutes.

"They will all be working on this project together," Asper said. "There's no football rivalries here."