Researchers at URI collect sand at Salty Brine Beach, hoping to help solve mysterious explosion

The mystery as to what started the explosion at Salty Brine beach in Narragansett continues. State and Federal officials have no turned to the help of researchers at the University of Rhode Island. Graduate students and their Professors spent Thursday Collecting samples of the sand.

"What we are going to do with them now is chemically analyze the gases in the sediment to see if there is anything that could have been responsible for what appeared to have been an explosion,"Says Art Spivack, a Professor of Oceanography at URI.

Oceanography graduate students along with their professor cut a large tube of beach sand into sections, taking samples from each. Spivack says they are testing for levels of naturally occurring gases such as methane and hydrogen. Which he says can cause explosions, but it happening at a beach is rare.

Stephen Porder, an associate professor at brown university, , says he's not ruling anything out, and "it still seems extraordinarily unlikely to me that was the cause, but if you rule out the impossible and all you are left with is the improbable, maybe that's the truth."

He says methane would have to build up, and get trapped which is highly unlikely.

"It would then require that methane to be exposed to the air and a spark provided, which I guess is slightly more possible,"adds Porder.

He says he's been told power cables, like the ones found under the sand at salty brine, reacting with salts, can cause explosions. But those power cables were inactive. The research into solving this mystery picks back up Friday, where they will begin chemical analysis on the sand to see how high the gas levels are. Results are expected within a week.