A picture of the Gulf from above really can be worth those 1000 words

The truism about pictures versus words is amply illustrated by SkyTruth’s running blog, which provides ongoing wide-angle illustrations of the Gulf Oil Spill. Founded in 2001 by John Amos, a geologist experienced in satellite image processing, image analysis, and digital mapping techniques, SkyTruth (http://www.skytruth.org/index.htm) is now a small non-profit organization interested in applying that technology to environmental issues. Its goal is to shine a bright, and visual, light on the state of the earth. SkyTruth started a blog in 2007 (http://blog.skytruth.org/), but was the effort was relatively sleepy; posts averaged less than 2 per month, on mostly random subjects but occasionally including notes about oil leaks from offshore platforms.

As it happens, Mr. Amos provided expert testimony to the U.S. Senate’s United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in November 2009, focusing on the risks of offshore drilling illustrated by a blowout at a platform off the coast of Australia in 2008 covered 22,000 square miles of ocean with oil in a 10 week stretch. His street cred on the topic was therefore well established by the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew. The day after the explosion, SkyTruth’s blog, usually written by Mr. Amos, started writing and posting dramatic pictures of the resulting fire and oil plumes. In contrast to its earlier slow pace, it has kept up nearly daily postings ever since. The content combines summaries of the day’s events and running commentary (often critical) with excellent photos, various technical analyses of numerical estimates, quantitative comparisons, satellite images, videos, and radar images illustrating the movement of oil and impacts throughout the Gulf region. The images are usually heavily annotated to point out landmarks and patterns, which is usually helpful but occasionally distracting (and hard to evaluate for accuracy), and the text comes with a heavy helping of disdain for just about anyone involved in the response.

Nonetheless, SkyTruth has been credited with being at the forefront of those questioning, and eventually disproving, the low-ball official estimates of the volume of oil gushing out of the ocean floor. Also a worthwhile resource, in mid-May SkyTruth joined with the Ocean Conservancy and the Surfrider Foundation to host an interesting interactive and comprehensive web site, the Gulf Oil Spill Tracker (http://oilspill.skytruth.org/main), as a repository of reports from the public about oil sightings and locations.