MIT-based Grassroots Mapping mapping the oil spill with digital camera, kites
By Laura June 
posted June 17th 2010 5:02PM
posted June 17th 2010 5:02PM
Grassroots Mapping, a project born out of MIT fellow Jeffrey Yoo Warren, is seeking to photograph and "map" the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Their project seeks to come up with cheap and easy to find tools for aerial photography. Their newest project is using cameras attached to kites to photograph the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in order to assess the damage and help along the response to it. The Gulf mapping project got under way on May 5th, and the project is now accepting donations to help fund its research. The results (which you can see above) are incredibly striking. A video is below -- hit up the source link for more images.
Neat I guess, would be cooler if they were spending the time working on a solution rather than practicing cartography
@Josh S This could be useful, give the workers on the ground an inexpensive way to get a birds eye view.
However BP has made this whole cleanup even harder with all their dispersants. Had they just left it alone most of the oil would be up on the surface where we could have some chance at skimming it off. now that it is all throughout the water column, its going to be damn near impossible to get it all, the surface water could look clean, but there be a huge glob of oil floating a hundred feet down or so, next thing you know a surprise when this thing washes up on a beach with no warning.
BP knew all along how bad this was spewing, that's why they were directly injecting the dispersants into the gusher, they figured we would never figure out how bad it was if we couldn't see it.
Why are these dispersants even legal to use on spills/leaks and how often are they used on smaller leaks to keep them from ever surfacing?
@Josh S
This is what they're good at. It's useful.
@d0ug I think the dispersants are legal because they... disperse the oil, allowing it to break down quicker. It doesn't have anything to do with pockets of denser fluid sitting below the surface of the water
@Josh S would be cooler if you were spending the time working on a solution rather than practicing armchair criticism. An engineer knows that documentation is an essential part of the process. And no one would've even gotten upset without documentation of the disaster, which BP is doing its best to suppress.
(disclosure: Jeffrey is dogsitting for me this weekend.)
@icecreamsocialist Ironically I sort of am, I work for one of the service companies helping with the containment effort, I'm a field engineer on a deepwater stimulation vessel... I'm pretty sure BP isn't suppressing documentation, do you have any facts?
@Josh S It would be cooler if you quit your job and abandoned your family to help clean up the oil spill. It is clearly the only thing worth doing now.
You humans still haven't managed cleaning that mess up? Since it was me that caused it (damn laser missing Fox News Satellite) I will give you my advice. http://www.twitpic.com/1v5tkb
@Lord Vader HaHa. So true. But replace "gungans" with iPhone KIRFS
I practice a very little bit of KAP (Kite Aerial Photography) using the same kite, which for anyone interested is called a Sutton Flowform. Not sure what size they're using, but a FF 16 (16 square feet) would easily hoist a digicam cradle in moderate winds.
I like the idea of what they're doing, but it could only ever provide localized snapshots, versus giving a useful sample size. I would think that DIY UAV drones would be much more useful, having them follow the coast line and snap pictures, but the wind that makes KAP possible here might be prohibitive for that.
@chispito
Yeah why not get remote controlled aerial drones...that would be way more useful.
@DoctarPeppar Funds. As this amounts to volunteer work, the cheaper the better. Remote controlled aerial drones costs lots of money to make and fly, and most owned by the government are about then thousand miles from the gulf of mexico right now.
It's always MIT.
-Proud!
So, you want to map the oil spill, huh?
I was wondering what I was actually looking at until I realised those dots weren't raindrops.
This oil spill is such a sad disaster. Thank you Republicans and your great and wonderful deregulation.