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Sunset view on the Q4000 drilling vessel in the Gulf of Mexico, 140 miles south of Louisiana in May 2017. Photo courtesy of Alexey Portnov.
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Offshore methane hydrate coring expedition in the Gulf of Mexico in May 2017 that I partcipated in:
Below is a video of the expedition (~8 min long):
Short Bio
I grew up in Dalian, a city sitting on the coast line in the north region of People's Republic of China. In May 2016, I graduated from Beloit College, Wisconsin with a major in Geology and a minor in Physics. In June 2016, I started my career at the University of Texas at Austin as a Master student in Geosciences.
My current research focuses on the formation and dissociation mechanisms of natural gas clathrate hydrate systems at the pore scale, using micro-Raman spectroscopy. The motivation is that most investigations on the formation and dissociaiton mechanisms of clathrate hydrate are at macroscopic scales, whereas these phenomena are not well understood at the pore scales. Raman spectroscopy is capable of identifying different compositions in different phases (such as liquid water, water in clathrate hydrate, methane in gas phase, and methane in clathrate hydrate) and the salinity of the water solution.
This page was updated on March 3, 2018.