At Gloucester Point, inside a haunted-looking, 70-year-old house and what was once its garage, a team of marine scientists are immersing themselves in mud.
The scientists, from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science's Division of Geological and Benthic Oceanography, have received a two-year, $218,914 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to study the interactions of water and mud at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay, one facet of bay activity about which very little is known.
FOR THE RECORD - Published correction ran Sunday, December 9, 1990. An article in the Dec. 2 Local section incorrectly said the Bedford Institute of Oceanography on the Bay of Fundy is in the Canadian province of Ontario. The institute is in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
"In terms of cohesive sediments, we have a helluva long way to go," says Robert J. Byrne, associate director of research at VIMS.
Knowing more about the movement of mud, or "cohesive sediment dynamics," the scientists hope, will help them give better advice about improving water quality and curbing erosion, among other things.
The success of the research depends on the effectiveness of their data gatherer: a $50,000 homemade, motor-powered, 8-foot, 700-pound, aluminum, donut-shaped device that will be dunked in the York River for the first time in the spring.
"Not much is new here," says its primary creator, Jerome P.-Y. Maa, known as The Mud Man because of his vast knowledge of mud. "Aluminum is not new. Motors are not new. The idea is new."
Similar machines, generically called "sea bed flumes," are in use in five laboratories worldwide, including three in the United States and one each in China and Japan, Maa says. But only one other, at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in the Bay of Fundy, in Ontario, Canada, is used in a natural, outdoor laboratory.
However, the Bedford flume, first submerged in 1989, gathers data for scientists studying the movement of sand, not mud, making the VIMS flume unique in its mission.
Canadian scientists as well as those at VIMS say a sea bed flume is the perfect tool to study bay, river and sea bottoms because they effectively reproduce underwater flow, stirring sediments as naturally as a machine can while gathering data about the particles. The first flume, a straight one, was used by scientists in 1982 at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts.
The VIMS flume will be underwater for two or three days at a time, with its motor constantly running, says Maa. He first proposed the idea shortly after his arrival to the marine science institute in 1987 and completed the design for it last year.
It has not yet been completed, but, like other circular, sea bed flumes, it will work like this:
A motor, sealed with a water-tight cover, activates steel chains, which resemble large bicycle chains. The chains move a flume cover that rotates atop the stationary, donut-shaped flume. Much like the open palm of a hand drawn flat across the top of a water surface, the rotating flume cover creates a gentle current that stirs sediment up on the river bottom. If the cover moves properly, it creates water flow, similar to the underwater flow in the bay.
An optic sensor affixed to the inside of the flume gathers data about sediment movement inside the flume; that data is fed into computers in the marine science institute's Hoxton Hall and its annex, headquarters for VIMS' geological division.
The scientists hope that the data will help them answer questions about:
* How dredging projects impact bay and river bottoms;
* How water moves mud;
* How bay and river bottoms - and their depressions and slopes - affect the way water moves ashore, causing erosion; and
* What happens to toxic substances, like the pesticide kepone - which after being dumped into the James River by a Hopewell company forced the closure of fishing in the river from 1975 to 1988 - after they are absorbed in mud.
"Mud is a whole other storage place for contaminants," says Beth Millemann, executive director of the Coast Alliance, a Washington, D.C.-based national coalition of coastal activists. "The problem with the collection of contaminants in mud is that mud is not a natural cleanser. It easily can be disturbed, and the contaminants can scatter.
"The Chesapeake Bay is one of many places where there's a contamination problem."
It's unclear when scientists will have the information needed to give practical advice, they say.
"It will be a little like finding a cure for cancer," says L. Donelson Wright, professor and assistant director of the marine science institute's geological division. "Within the next decade, we'll be able to give answers, but there will still be unknowns."