Mapping the Deep Water Horizon

The basic details are well known: on April 20th, an explosion on the drilling rig "Deepwater Horizon" killed eleven crewmen; the fire was could not be extinguished and on April 22nd the rig sank, leaving the well gushing, resulting in the largest off-shore oil spill in United States history.

Since late April, millions across the globe have become increasingly concerned with the impending disaster growing in the Gulf of Mexico. One of the factors behind this growing concern have been the proliferation and extensive usage of remote sensing technologies. From satellite sensors to underwater cameras, concerned citizens, politicians, disaster management responders, and corporate executives have anxiously followed the online images and video feeds.



Aside from pretty (or grainy) pictures and videos, at a broad scale, what do these media forms, and their usages, tell us about interactions between humans and the environment in this contemporary moment. More specifically, how do these technologies, and their usages, inform our understanding of the "production" of environmental disasters, their (re)mediation, and the assignment of blame?

First, what are the media through which we are increasingly coming to remotely know this expanding place that is the disaster area? Due to the spatial and temporal scales of the spill (i.e. how much and how fast it is growing) as well as its distant location (both from land and below sea), remote sensing technologies have been of incredible value and used widely. Remote sensing is frequently thought to pertain solely to satellite images. However, as wiki informs us: remote sensing is "the use of either recording or real-time sensing device(s) that are wireless, or not in physical or intimate contact with the object". With this definition, we see that much of our individual and collective knowledge of this place, and its recent transformations, have occurred as a result of remote sensing technologies: principally satellite images and underwater video feeds.

In trying to keep this post short, I´ll simply direct the interested reader to several sites I think are thought provoking on the topic.

The first link takes you to NASA´s page devoted to the oil spill. Here you´ll find a variety of links to specific sensors, and stories derived from them (think how do we know we have environmental problems...)

The next link takes you once again to NASA, but this time o it´s AVIRIS sensor page (for images obtaned from an airplane vis a vis a sensor)


Following that you might be interested in what some of the other private and commercial satellites are up to in this time of environmental disaster. To help answer that question see the following link for imager from Terra, Digital Globe etc.

After that, on our tour of remote sensing media, I´d suggest a peek at this link to a real-time server illustration showing the growing extent of the damage showing spill.

It's not only the spatial and environmental scale of the disaster that are expanding (clearly the two are linked)as the following link shows, the political extent of spill is increasing...

Perhaps Obama gave Discover Magazine it´s headline illustrated in this last link...

What will be the short and long term implications of this spill at various scales from environmental, economic, political, and cultural perspectives. I don´t have the answers, but what I do think is that remote sensing technologies will play an important role in how we understand the nature of the problem and the potential solutions.