Philomath ocean optics lab has a world-wide audience

PHILOMATH — West-bound motorists driving through Philomath on their way to the coast or Alsea might be surprised to learn that tucked behind Wing Sing restaurant on Main Street lies a leading ocean optics company.

When Ron Zaneveld and Casey Moore founded Western Environmental Technology Laboratories in 1992, the two worked out of a Philomath garage creating instruments that use the properties of light to detect vital biological, chemical and geological parameters and processes of the Earth’s oceans, lakes and streams.

Now WET Labs occupies a 15,000-square-foot building, employs about 40 people and designs and manufactures underwater instrumentation used by universities, government agencies and scientists throughout the world.

“All here in Philomath. Who would have thought?” said Zaneveld, 62, one of the company’s four doctorate-holding oceanographers.

WET Labs products help oceanographers study how light transmits through the ocean and how it is absorbed and scattered.

WET Labs sensors and profiling floats use light to take measurements, including parameters related to the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean, as well as the levels of phytoplankton and particulates in water columns.

NASA has used WET Labs instruments to validate measurements obtained with its optical satellite sensors, Zaneveld said.

The ocean has layers, and it’s always changing.

“You can’t just go to the ocean and take a bucket of water and say, ‘This is what the ocean is like.’ Because it varies with depth, horizontally and with physical processes like the tides,” Zaneveld said.

WET Labs’ moored profiler gives scientists a more comprehensive understanding of the ocean, because it winches up and down, taking measurements over broad spans of time and space.

Equipment moored to the ocean floor tends to “foul” quickly. Organisms grow on the sensors, which interferes with the light measurements. WET Labs has devised a solution. The company now installs copper covers over its underwater equipment’s windows. The copper creates an inhospitable environment for bacteria and other growths.

The windows each have a shutter that opens periodically to take measurements. The shutter also acts as a windshield wiper. With these copper covers, equipment that would have fouled after a week can now stay underwater for up to three months, Zaneveld said.

The Dutch-born Zaneveld came to Corvallis in the 1960s as a graduate student. After completing his doctoral work at Oregon State University, he joined the faculty.

He led the ocean optics group in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, and retired from OSU in 2001 after 30 years. He’s now an emeritus professor.

Even though Zaneveld is no longer a fixture in the college, his instruments are.

While studying hypoxia (low oxygen) off the Oregon coast, OSU marine ecologist Francis Chan used two pieces of WET Labs equipment on the Elakha research vessel.

“One of the key questions when trying to understand the ocean is how productive the water column is,” Chan said, adding that productivity is determined by microscopic plants called phytoplankton.

A drop of water holds tens of thousands of phytoplankton cells, so trying to count them one by one “is a daunting task,” Chan said.

The WET Labs fluorometer makes the process much easier.

“The fluorometer takes advantage of the chemistry of chlorophyll, which is what makes plants green. The device flashes a light, then measures the response light of the plants,” Chan said.

In OSU’s “dead zone” research, which received widespread media attention this summer, Chan also used a transmissometer.

This piece of equipment measures the amount of fine particles in the water, which often is indicative of the number of phytoplankton cells, according to Chan.

It’s important to know about phytoplankton concentrations, because when they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean, decomposing and using up oxygen. For the past several years, this natural process has created low-oxygen conditions off the Oregon coast.

In addition to being an award-winning oceanographer, Zaneveld also is an artist. His acrylic paintings, most of which depict scenes involving water, are housed in private and museum collections throughout North America and Europe.

Because humans and the Earth they inhabit are mostly water, understanding this life source is key, Zaneveld said.

“The oceans cover most of the Earth. If we don’t understand what the ocean is doing, we can’t understand what we’re doing to the planet,” he said.

Mary Ann Albright covers higher education. She can be reached at maryann.albright@lee.net or 758-9518.