The Gulf of Mexico continues to hemorrhage oil, threatening to do more harm each day. Boston scientists are involved in the effort to assess and limit the damage. Here are a few. If you know of others, please post to the forum.
• Jeff Warren, who designs maps and visual programming environments at the MIT Media Lab’s Design Ecology group, is working on citizen aerial mapping effort in the Gulf. He offers picture and comments on his blog at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media.
We’re helping citizens to use balloons, kites, and other simple and inexpensive tools to produce their own aerial imagery of the spill… documentation that will be essential for environmental and legal use in coming years.
We’re not trying to duplicate the satellite imagery or the flyover data (though we’re helping to coordinate some of the flyovers and trying to make sure the data is publicly accessible). We believe in complete open access to spill imagery and are releasing all imagery into the public domain…
I went down early last week to New Orleans and began coordinating a citizen aerial mapping effort with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade: using my recent research in low-cost balloon and kite-based aerial imaging. Our efforts have begun to bear fruit, as almost daily trips into the Gulf are bringing back stunning imagery.
• Also at MIT, hurricane researcher Kerry Emanuel dashes hopes that a storm could somehow improve the situation. NPR reports
Environmental scientists are already predicting that oil from the spill will damage the vegetation in coastal marshes. And the damage could be worse if a hurricane pushed oil deep into a wetland, or into currents that would carry it down Florida’s west coast.
Phil Radford, executive director of Greenpeace USA, inspects oil-covered reeds along the Gulf of Mexico while visiting the disaster site on May 20.
“That’s a big concern,” Emanuel says. “Hurricanes would be pretty effective at dispersing [the oil] and pushing it around.”
• Finally, The Boston Globe reports that the New England Aquarium is holding back on releasing more than two dozen Kemp’s ridley turtles. They were among 200 endangered turtlea that washed up on Cape Cod last winter.
The unfolding Gulf of Mexico oil leak is on track to deeply pollute estuaries and coastal bays where Kemp’s ridleys live. Two turtles have been found covered with oil and are being treated now in Louisiana, and environmental officials expect more in the weeks to come.
Officials at the New England Aquarium had planned to release about a dozen of the dinner-plate-sized turtles in the Gulf last month, until the massive British Petroleum leak disrupted their plans. Then a contingency idea to release the animals off South Carolina was also put on hold after signs emerged that the oil may be rounding Florida and heading up the East Coast.