PRISON NATION U$A

Changes to Opioid Addiction Treatment in Federal Prisons Threaten Peoples’ Lives

Incarcerated people are reporting that the abrupt changes are wreaking havoc on their health and mental well-being.

By Pam Bailey , 

Truthout

March 26, 2025

Chandler Lackey, 22, writes down an inventory of resentments, a pilot program with a mentor as part of the Substance Treatment Opportunity Program, at the Worcester County Jail and House of Corrections in West Boylston, Massachusetts, on September 23, 2019.David L. Ryan / The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Treatment for those struggling with opioid addiction in the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is about to get a lot worse, warn a former BOP case manager and a medical professional who recently left the agency.

The BOP directed staff about a month ago to require all participants in medication-assisted treatment (MAT) programs to switch from monthly injections (primarily of buprenorphine, which treats opioid use disorder) to daily strips that are dissolved under the tongue.

The changes further erode the well-being of incarcerated people who struggle with substance use disorder, which the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates is roughly 47 percent of those held in U.S. jails and prisons. Medical and mental health care in prison is already notoriously poor, and when MAT was first introduced, hopes were high. However, experts warn that the abrupt change in treatment protocol is liable to provoke violence and increase addiction

“Monthly injections are safer for everyone,” says Andrea Brockman, a regional mental health ombudsman for a state correctional system and a clinical psychologist who worked for the BOP for 11 years before joining the team of the federal Prison Education and Reform Alliance (PERA). “It protects participants from being beaten up, or worse, by people who want the oral strips to sell or use.” She warned the change to strips could increase suicides, overdoses and conflict.

Both the formulary and the clinical guidelines for implementation of MAT have been removed from the BOP’s public website, and the agency has not given a reason for this change, says PERA Executive Director Jack Donson, a former BOP case manager. “This lack of transparency is endemic within the BOP right now.”

Related Story  

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The pandemic bared the cruelty of prison in new ways. It was a lost opportunity to move away from mass incarceration. By Maya Schenwar , Truthout  March 11, 2025

BOP Associate Deputy Director Kathleen Toomey told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies on February 26 that, “While we continue to prioritize hiring, we are making significant changes to reduce costs and maximize our use of existing resources. For example, we reduced all operating budgets by 20 percent…. We’ve saved $10 million by moving to lower-cost drugs where it’s medically appropriate, particularly those for medication-assisted treatment.”

Brockman questions whether strips are indeed “medically appropriate” within a prison setting due to the risk of diversion. An analysis of deaths in federal prison by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General found that 20 percent were due to drug overdose.

The BOP did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Switching to Strips Provokes Intimidation and Violence

Elain Kay Young, who is incarcerated at FCI Waseca, a low-security federal women’s prison in Minnesota, says there is rampant drug use there.

“We have problems with K2 [a synthetic form of marijuana’s active ingredient] as well, but abuse of the strips is extensive,” she wrote in an email from the prison this month. “People are getting into MAT who do not belong; they are there to get stuff to sell. As a result of these drugs, the women here have bills they cannot begin to pay, and there are constant threats and fights, which endanger everyone. Meanwhile people who really need the MAT program can’t get in, because the prison doesn’t have the proper resources. I know three girls who are desperate to kick [their addiction], but they are stuck on the MAT wait list.”

Such problems could be prevented if the BOP followed the guidelines set out by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The federal agency recommends dedicated administration rooms where recipients stay until the strips are fully consumed, with accompanying mouth checks. Without these safety measures, the drug can too easily be passed from one person to another via “birding,” a practice in which individuals hide the strips in their cheeks, then regurgitate them into someone else’s mouth.

The staff “does engage in some degree of mouth checks, if you can call [them] that,” says Brockman. “It is a brief mouth-open-tongue-out-and-moved up-and-down thing. But nothing that is adequate. These strips are easy to hide.”

Another problem is the way the BOP is implementing the treatment change. Jason Cooke, who is incarcerated at the federal Atwater penitentiary in California, reported that after two years on the highest-dose, 300-milligram (mg) shot, he was switched to the lowest-dose, 2-mg strip. The retired physician noted that a 2-mg suboxone strip “is quite low when you consider that one injection is equivalent to approximately 16-24 mg a day of the sublingual medication.” After intervention by PERA Executive Director Donson, Cooke was moved up to 8 mg.

“I’m in prison because I was an addict; I robbed pharmacies for Oxycontin, and I was doing an unbelievable amount a day,” Cooke wrote Truthout in an email on January 18. “But I was finally doing good with my injection. Then they took me off, and my whole life changed and now it’s upside down. Are these people trying to make me flip out and start cutting my wrists? Because that’s what’s about to happen. I’m not eating or sleeping. Honestly? I want to kill myself. I’m so tired of feeling this way.”
Inventory and Physician Shortages

USP Atwater is among the first federal prisons to fully transition from the shots to the sublingual strips. Aggravating the situation there is the fact that the strips could not be prescribed until each participant was seen by the doctor, who only comes to the prison one day a week. Cooke says sometimes medical visits are canceled when the prisoners are locked into their cells. The prison often locks down during fog because prison guards stationed in towers can’t see incarcerated people in the recreation yard. On top of that, Cooke says the transition to strips has been marred by constant inventory shortages. “There’s about 80 guys who just started the MAT program and are right now going without their strips for the second week in a row because staff aren’t keeping enough inventory in the pharmacy,” Cooke wrote on February 16. “There are guys who were due for their injection 10 days ago!!”

PERA’s Donson notes that MAT medication should not be in short supply any more than other pharmaceuticals, such as blood pressure medication. He speculated the shortage was caused by poor planning after the transition order came down.

As Brockman pointed out, the switch to strips can have another alarming consequence: more frequent drug use and all that comes with it. Individuals who are forced to wait for a replacement, and/or are switched to a less-than-adequate dose experience withdrawal symptoms that often cause them to seek out stronger drugs. This can result in a range of adverse outcomes: overdose, incident reports, increase in security classification, placement in restrictive housing, and the loss of good conduct time and/or First Step Act release credits.

One individual at the Victorville medium-security prison in California was reportedly placed in solitary confinement after overdosing. In addition, everyone in his unit was punished with loss of phone and email privileges — a factor his friends believe contributed to his death by suicide in February.

As the Prison Policy Initiative noted in a February report, “Ultimately, we find that ‘correctional healthcare’ is not really healthcare in the traditional sense …. [These systems] are designed in such a way that incarcerated people’s health needs are treated more like a nuisance than their ostensible mission. Instead, this walled-off healthcare system functions like a cost control service for corrections departments, organized around limiting spending and fending off lawsuits rather than actually caring for anyone’s health.”

If administered properly in prison, MAT can reduce post-release drug-related mortality by 80 to 85 percent. In other words, the BOP’s rush to cut costs in any way possible is penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Criminal legal reform advocates point out that a fully effective addiction treatment is ultimately not possible in prison.

“Jails and prisons are not healthcare institutions and their mandate for punishment makes patient-centered care impossible and health outcomes worse. Instead, the United States desperately needs healthcare infrastructure that can support people who use drugs outside of carceral settings,” concludes a Prison Policy Initiative report.
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This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Pam Bailey  is co-founder of More Than Our Crimes and a freelance journalist.

RACHEL CARSON WAS RIGHT

Insecticides may contribute to bigger problems with certain weeds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Penn State

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Insecticides may help growers hoping to protect their crops from harmful insects, but they also may contribute to a larger amount of some weeds, according to a study led by researchers at Penn State.

The study — published in the journal PeerJ — compared using insecticides preventively at planting versus using an integrated pest management (IPM) approach, which calls for insecticides only when a known insect problem exists.

The team also investigated the effects of using cover crops — a crop used to cover and protect soil after harvesting the cash crop — when combined with these treatment plans.

The researchers found that by the third year, some fields that were treated with insecticides and didn’t have a cover crop ended up with slightly more weeds — especially marestail. However, planting a cover crop prevented this issue, even in fields that were treated with insecticides.

John Tooker, an author on the paper and a professor of entomology in the College of Agricultural Sciences, said that while he and the other researchers aren’t sure what caused these findings, the most likely explanation may be that the preventative insecticides limited the activity of insects that typically eat weeds or weed seeds, allowing the weeds to be more abundant.

He added that the findings could be helpful to growers as they create management plans for their fields, and that while preventively using herbicides makes sense because weeds are such a widespread problem, insect pests are less common.

“Always using an insecticide at planting does not seem to be the best approach in Pennsylvania considering that early-season insect pests tend to be a relatively uncommon problem,” Tooker said. “When taking an IPM approach, we advocate for using the right products at the right time to control the right pests, and that will also then help reduce these negative consequences of using these treatments too much.”

Elizabeth Rowen, lead author and assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside, said the findings are particularly relevant as weeds are becoming more resistant to glyphosate, a commonly used herbicide.

“Many of the seeds growers use were developed to not be killed by herbicides,” she explained. “This allows growers to use glyphosate to control weeds; however, this also results in the evolution of herbicide-resistant weeds, which makes it much harder to control weeds without killing the crops. So, having multiple strategies to help manage weeds is really important.”

Insects such as beetles, ants and crickets eat weed seeds, which can make them one of these strategies, she said. But insecticides may affect these beneficial insects in addition to pests, interfering with their ability to eat these seeds and control weed populations.

For the study, the researchers used plots growing corn and soybeans at the Penn State Russell E. Larson Agricultural Research Center. They assigned each plot one of three treatment plans: using preventative insecticides at planting, an IPM treatment plan that used insecticides only when insect pests reached a certain threshold, or no insecticides at all. The team also tested each treatment with and without a cover crop.

The researchers then examined the plots over three years, taking note of several factors along the way, such as cover crop biomass, predator insect communities, weed seed predation, weed populations and crop productivity.

Tooker said that the study provides evidence that an IPM approach can be valuable to growers, especially those with large acreage systems.

“Oftentimes corn and soybean fields are so big that growers are inclined to do all of the management up front so they don't have to go back and walk the fields,” he said. “But our evidence suggests that walking these fields to identify problems as they happen can provide clear benefits in terms of not needing certain pesticides, namely many of the fungicides and insecticides.”

Kirsten Ann Pearsons, IPM coordinator at T&L Nursery, who earned her doctorate in entomology at Penn State; Richard Smith, University of New Hampshire; and Kyle Wickings, Cornell University, also co-authored this study.

The Agriculture and Food Research Initiative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture helped support this research.

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Journal

PeerJ

DOI

10.7717/peerj.18597 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Insecticides may facilitate the escape of weeds from biological control

Technology developed by MIT engineers makes pesticides stick to plant leaves

With the new system, farmers could significantly cut their use of pesticides and fertilizers, saving money and reducing runoff.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Reducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers could decrease polluting runoff, while at the same time cutting farmers’ costs and perhaps enhancing productivity.

 

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Credit: Courtesy of Kripa Varanasi, et al

Reducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers — including fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides — could cut down the amount of polluting runoff that ends up in the environment while at the same time reducing farmers’ costs and perhaps even enhancing their productivity. A classic win-win-win.

A team of researchers at MIT and a spinoff company they launched has developed a system to do just that. Their technology adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, greatly reducing their tendency to bounce off leaves and end up wasted on the ground. Instead, the coated droplets stick to the leaves as intended.

The research is described today in the journal Soft Matter, in a paper by recent MIT alumni Vishnu Jayaprakash PhD ’22 and Sreedath Panat PhD ’23, graduate student Simon Rufer, and MIT professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.

A recent study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetable, and 32 percent of cereal production. Despite their importance, a lack of technology that monitors and optimizes sprays has forced farmers to rely on personal experience and rules of thumb to decide how to apply these chemicals. As a result, these chemicals tend to be over-sprayed, leading to runoff and chemicals ending up in waterways or building up in the soil.

Pesticides take a significant toll on global health and the environment, the researchers point out. A recent study found that 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution. And agricultural chemicals are a major expense for farmers: In the U.S., they spend $16 billion a year just on pesticides.

Making spraying more efficient is one of the best ways to make food production more sustainable and economical. Agricultural spraying essentially boils down to mixing chemicals into water and spraying water droplets onto plant leaves, which are often inherently water-repellent. “Over more than a decade of research in my lab at MIT, we have developed fundamental understandings of spraying and the interaction between droplets and plants — studying when they bounce and all the ways we have to make them stick better and enhance coverage,” Varanasi says. 

The team had previously found a way to reduce the amount of sprayed liquid that bounces away from the leaves it strikes, which involved using two spray nozzles instead of one and spraying mixtures with opposite electrical charges. But they found that farmers were reluctant to take on the expense and effort of converting their spraying equipment to a two-nozzle system. So, the team looked for a simpler alternative.

They discovered they could achieve the same improvement in droplet retention using a single-nozzle system that can be easily adapted to existing sprayers. Instead of giving the droplets of pesticide an electric charge, they coat each droplet with a vanishingly thin layer of an oily material. 

In their new study, they conducted lab experiments with high-speed cameras. When they sprayed droplets with no special treatment onto a water-repelling (hydrophobic) surface similar to that of many plant leaves, the droplets initially spread out into a pancake-like disk, then rebounded back into a ball and bounced away. But when the researchers coated the surface of the droplets with a tiny amount of oil — making up less than 1 percent of the droplet’s liquid — the droplets spread out and then stayed put. The treatment improved the droplets’ “stickiness” by as much as a hundredfold.

“When these droplets are hitting the surface and as they expand, they form this oil ring that essentially pins the droplet to the surface,” Rufer says. The researchers tried a wide variety of conditions, he says, explaining that they conducted hundreds of experiments, “with different impact velocities, different droplet sizes, different angles of inclination, all the things that fully characterize this phenomenon.” Though different oils varied in their effectiveness, all of them were effective. “Regardless of the impact velocity and the oils, we saw that the rebound height was significantly lower,” he says.

The effect works with remarkably small amounts of oil. In their initial tests they used 1 percent oil compared to the water, then they tried a 0.1 percent, and even .01. The improvement in droplets sticking to the surface continued at a 0.1 percent, but began to break down beyond that. “Basically, this oil film acts as a way to trap that droplet on the surface, because oil is very attracted to the surface and sort of holds the water in place,” Rufer says. 

In the researchers’ initial tests they used soybean oil for the coating, figuring this would be a familiar material for the farmers they were working with, many of whom were growing soybeans. But it turned out that though they were producing the beans, the oil was not part of their usual supply chain for use on the farm. In further tests, the researchers found that several chemicals that farmers were already routinely using in their spraying, called surfactants and adjuvants, could be used instead, and that some of these provided the same benefits in keeping the droplets stuck on the leaves. 

“That way,” Varanasi says, “we’re not introducing a new chemical or changed chemistries into their field, but they’re using things they’ve known for a long time.” 

Varanasi and Jayaprakash formed a company called AgZen to commercialize the system. In order to prove how much their coating system improves the amount of spray that stays on the plant, they first had to develop a system to monitor spraying in real time. That system, which they call RealCoverage, has been deployed on farms ranging in size from a few dozen acres to hundreds of thousands of acres, and many different crop types, and has saved farmers 30 to 50 percent on their pesticide expenditures, just by improving the controls on the existing sprays. That system is being deployed to 920,000 acres of crops in 2025, the company says, including some in California, Texas, the Midwest, France and Italy. Adding the cloaking system using new nozzles, the researchers say, should yield at least another doubling of efficiency.

“You could give back a billion dollars to U.S. growers if you just saved 6 percent of their pesticide budget,” says Jayaprakash, lead author of the research paper and CEO of AgZen. “In the lab we got 300 percent of extra product on the plant. So that means we could get orders of magnitude reductions in the amount of pesticides that farmers are spraying.”

Farmers had already been using these surfactant and adjuvant chemicals as a way to enhance spraying effectiveness, but they were mixing it with a water solution. For it to have any effect, they had to use much more of these materials, risking causing burns to the plants. The new coating system reduces the amount of these materials needed, while improving their effectiveness.

In field tests conducted by AgZen, “we doubled the amount of product on kale and soybeans just by changing where the adjuvant was,” from mixed in to being a coating, Jayaprakash says. It’s convenient for farmers because “all they’re doing is changing their nozzle. They’re getting all their existing chemicals to work better, and they’re getting more product on the plant.”

And it’s not just for pesticides. “The really cool thing is this is useful for every chemistry that’s going on the leaf, be it an insecticide, a herbicide, a fungicide, or foliar nutrition,” Varanasi says. This year, they plan to introduce the new spray system on about 30,000 acres of cropland.

Varanasi says that with projected world population growth, “the amount of food production has got to double, and we are limited in so many resources, for example we cannot double the arable land. … This means that every acre we currently farm must become more efficient and able to do more with less.” These improved spraying technologies, for both monitoring the spraying and coating the droplets, Varanasi says, “I think is fundamentally changing agriculture.”

AgZen has recently raised $10 million in venture financing to support rapid commercial deployment of these technologies that can improve the control of chemical inputs into agriculture. “The knowledge we are gathering from every leaf, combined with our expertise in interfacial science and fluid mechanics, is giving us unparalleled insights into how chemicals are used and developed — and it’s clear that we can deliver value across the entire agrochemical supply chain,” Varanasi says  “Our mission is to use these technologies to deliver improved outcomes and reduced costs for the ag industry.” 

###

Written by David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

Paper: “Enhancing spray retention using cloaked droplets to reduce pesticide pollution”

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2025/sm/d4sm01496k

The technology adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, greatly reducing their tendency to bounce off leaves and end up wasted on the ground.

Credit

Courtesy of Kripa Varanasi, et al

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Journal

Soft Matter

DOI

10.1039/D4SM01496K 

Article Title

“Enhancing spray retention using cloaked droplets to reduce pesticide pollution”

Files.libcom.org

https://files.libcom.org/files/Bookchin%20M.%20Our%20Synthetic%20Environment.pdf

Our Synthetic Environment - Libcom.org 

Our Synthetic Environment. Murray Bookchin. 1962. Table of contents. Chapter 1: THE PROBLEM. Chapter 2: AGRICULTURE AND HEALTH. Chapter 3: URBAN LIFE AND HEALTH.

In Key State of Delaware, 'Corporate Insider Power Grab' Quietly Underway

"Delaware's Senate just chose billionaire insiders—like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg—over pension funds, retirement savers, and other investors by passing S.B. 21."


Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, arrives at the Delaware Court of Chancery in Wilmington on November 16, 2022.
(Photo: Hannah Beier for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Mar 18, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

The push to pass Senate Bill 21 in Delaware, the "corporate capital of the world," is garnering criticism from some anti-monopoly, economic, and legal experts this week.

"Delaware's Senate just chose billionaire insiders—like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg—over pension funds, retirement savers, and other investors by passing S.B. 21," Laurel Kilgour, research manager at the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), said in a Monday statement about state senators' overwhelming support for the "corporate insider power grab" last week.


Delaware lawmakers are swiftly working to overhaul state law after a judge ruled against Musk's $56 billion 2018 compensation package for Tesla. The CEO—who is the world's richest person and now a key leader in President Donald Trump's administration—then moved the incorporation for his other companies elsewhere, and urged other businesses to follow suit. Some are doing so and others are reportedly considering it, including Zuckerberg's Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

As Business Insiderreported last month, citing Delaware's Division of Corporations, nearly 2.2 million entities are registered in the tiny state, including two-thirds of all Fortune 500 companies.

"This bill only serves to make it easier for corporate boards to rubber-stamp excessive executive pay and self-serving deals that drain returns from pensioners and retirement accounts," warned Kilgour. "Coming on the heels of another panicked giveaway to the corporate defense bar just last year, this is a reckless move that will undermine investor confidence and further erode Delaware's credibility as a fair corporate forum. The Delaware House must step in and stop this dangerous bill before it's too late."



Specifically, as AELP laid out, "S.B. 21 jeopardizes the ability of investors to protect themselves from harmful board decisions that slash returns to investors' hard-earned retirement savings, such as awarding exorbitant executive pay packages that far exceed any rational benchmark, or overpaying to acquire companies in which controlling shareholders have financial stakes."

"The bill makes it easier for corporate boards to insulate directors and controlling shareholders from litigation over conflicts of interest and self-dealing by corporate insiders, narrows who qualifies as a controlling shareholder, imposes a new presumption that board members are independent no matter who they are appointed by, and makes it more difficult for shareholders to discover conflicts by restricting their access to internal corporate records," the nonprofit detailed.

Joseph R. Mason, a Ph.D. economist and fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, also sounded the alarm on S.B. 21 with a Monday opinion piece in the Delaware Business Times.

"I recently conducted an economic impact study on the likely effects of Senate Bill 21 (S.B. 21) on the Delaware economy. Based on my findings, a reasonable estimate of the annual economic activity lost due to S.B. 21's passage is $117 million-$235 million in decreased economic activity and 450-900 lost jobs, statewide," he wrote. "My analysis very likely understates the impact to Delaware, as it only estimates lost economic activity generated by law firms located in the state."



Mason's op-ed followed a Delaware Onlinepiece from attorney Greg Varallo, who is head of Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann's Delaware office and represented Richard Tornetta, the Tesla shareholder behind the Musk case in the state.

"On March 5, this paper published an op-ed by William Chandler and Lawrence Hamermesh," Varallo pointed out last week, referring to a former chancellor on the Delaware Court of Chancery who is now a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and a professor emeritus at the Widener University Delaware School of Law.

"In the piece, my old friends extolled the virtues of S.B. 21, going so far as to argue that the bill restored balance to the corporate law playing field. Nonsense. S.B. 21 is a license to steal for corporate controllers like Elon Musk," argued the lawyer, who spent decades leading a defense-side firm.

According to Varallo: "The idea that S.B. 21 will restore 'balance' between the interests of regular investors and billionaires who control companies is demonstrably false S.B. 21 creates 'safe harbors' for controllers to steal from their controlled public companies and from the stockholders who invested in those companies without having to answer for doing so. The bill overturns decades of thoughtfully crafted common law and puts Delaware in direct competition with Nevada for the state which gives controllers the clearest and easiest to follow road map to commit grand larceny."

"This isn't someone else's problem. If your retirement includes index funds, as most do, you are a stockholder in controlled companies because no index fund operates without owning controlled companies," he added. "As a citizen who believes that the independence of our judiciary is at the very core of our form of government, I can't sit still while the proponents of this legislation continue to attack the public servants who serve on the Court of Chancery, the nation's leading business court."

Meanwhile, as the Delaware Business Timesnoted Monday, S.B. 21 is backed by "two of the most powerful Delaware business organizations, the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce and the Delaware Business Roundtable," and groups that testified in support of it include ChristianaCare, the Central Delaware Chamber of Commerce, and the Home Builders Association of Delaware.

Despite expert warnings, Delaware lawmakers are continuing their efforts to send S.B. 21 to the desk of Democratic Gov. Matt Meyer, who last week called on them to pass the legislation "as quickly as possible." According to the Delaware General Assembly website, the state House introduced an amendment to the bill on Tuesday.

 

After the fury, hurricanes can leave a lasting mark on deep ocean

Marine Biological Laboratory

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Hurricane Igor (2010) over Bermuda and the MBL's Oceanic Flux Program research station. Credit: NASA MODIS

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Credit: NASA MODIS

By David Chandler

WOODS HOLE, Mass. – The impact of hurricanes when they travel over land, or when they affect ships or oil-drilling platforms, are quite well understood. But these huge cyclones also stir up the ocean itself, with consequences that are relatively unknown and hard to study.

But a unique, subsurface experimental platform moored to the floor of the Sargasso Sea, about 47 miles southeast of Bermuda, is changing that. With collection points at increasing depths along the mooring line, the traps constantly collect the sinking particles of sediment, microplankton shells, detritus, and pollutants that drift down into the deep ocean, sampling every two weeks to provide a nearly 5 decades-long record of changes in the environment.

And now, that moored observatory, run by the Oceanic Flux Program (OFP) at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), has provided detailed data that for the first time demonstrates how much of an impact hurricanes can have on this deep environment.

A team led by MBL Assistant Research Investigator Rut Pedrosa-Pamies studied the sediments that Hurricanes Fabian (2003) and Igor (2010) transported from the Bermuda carbonate platform -- a shallow-water reef refuge for marine life – and deposited to the deep ocean. They found significant effects that lasted for weeks. They published their data last week in Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans.

Hurricane Fabian, it turns out, delivered as much sediment to the deep ocean in just two weeks as would normally take a full year to accumulate. These sediments -- carbonate-rich material that forms in the thriving ecosystem on reef platforms -- have major effects on the ocean environment. If they get buried in deep sediments, they can sequester carbon for millennia or more. They can also provide a buffering effect to help offset ocean acidification, a consequence of rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

“This is the first time that a study has demonstrated, in near real time, this hurricane-induced transport from a shallow carbonate platform to the deep ocean,” Pedrosa-Pamies says. “And it’s not just carbonate; [a hurricane] also transports a lot of other materials like phosphorus, lithogenic minerals, and also pollutants, such as lead.”

Fabian and Igor in the Deep Sea

“I’ve been interested in extreme weather events for a long time now,” Pedrosa-Pamies says. “When a hurricane passes through, there is an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich waters” that nourish bacteria and plankton in the ocean’s upper layers, stimulating their productivity. But how hurricanes can impact the deep-ocean water column that surrounds shallow-water reefs has not been well studied.

The team also found that “not all hurricanes will trigger the same response,” she says. “It depends a lot on the ocean depth of the area, the upper-ocean conditions, the hurricane characteristics, etc.” Unlike Fabian, the carbonate platform particles resuspended by Hurricane Igor remained suspended for several weeks.

“That’s a key finding, because it proves that particles that get suspended from these extreme weather events can last for a long time in the ecosystem and the water column,” Pedrosa-Pamies says. “And I’m sure this has implications for the microbiome at different water depths, and also in terms of sedimentation rates and how the particles are aggregating.”

Shallow-water reefs are distributed around the world, and over time they build up extensive platforms of carbonate. These platforms play an important role in ocean sedimentary processes and the carbon cycle, Pedrosa-Pamies says. They account for an estimated half of all shallow-water carbonate production, and more than a quarter of all the carbonate that gets buried in the deep ocean.

While the impact of Hurricanes Fabian and Igor are small at the global level, the knowledge gained from this work about the fundamental mechanisms of sediment transport during major storms should apply to the extensive carbonate platforms worldwide. It points out the important role that storms can play in carbon sequestration, and the buffering of ocean acidification.

From Bermuda to Woods Hole

The OFP has been running continuously since 1978 and is “the longest time series of its kind,” Pedrosa-Pamies says. “Without having this time series, studying episodic events, like hurricanes in this case, would not be possible. You cannot sit out there when there is a storm passing and collect particles, while you have wind and big waves.”

The proximity of the sampling to Bermuda is important, she explains, because “Bermuda is the northernmost subtropical coral reef and carbonate platform in the world, and it’s frequently impacted by hurricanes.”

The OFP recently published an analysis of the sinking particles at its moored platform off Bermuda over a 44-year period (1978-2022). The results are published in Progress in Oceanography.

The process of pulling up the OFP’s deep mooring line aboard the ship and retrieving the samples for analysis, which is done every six months, is a challenging, day-long operation.

“I just cannot reinforce enough how important the team effort is in a time series like this. It would not be possible with help of the entire crew,” Pedrosa-Pamies says. “And they are all fantastic, and we’ve been working with them for a long time.”

After Hurricane Igor's passage in 2010, particles from the hurricane-induced sediment plume collected at 500 meters by the Oceanic Flux Program. This image shows the dominance of reef-sourced carbonate debris. See: Pedrosa-Pamies et al, J. Geophys. Research-Oceans, 2025

Credit

JC Weber

Scientists deploying the sediment trap at the Oceanic Flux Program research site off Bermuda. L-R: Rut Pedrosa Pamies, Jace Innis, JC Weber. See: Pedrosa-Pamies et al, J. Geophys. Research.-Oceans, 2025

 

Credit

Olivia Gadson

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The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is dedicated to scientific discovery – exploring fundamental biology, understanding marine biodiversity and the environment, and informing the human condition through research and education. Founded in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1888, the MBL is a private, nonprofit institution and an affiliate of the University of Chicago.

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Journal

Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans

DOI

10.1029/2023JC020500 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Hurricane-Driven Transport of Bermuda Reef Carbonate Platform Sediments to the Deep Ocean

Article Publication Date

15-Mar-2025