Bit o' brilliance.
Katja Schulz, Species Pages Coordinator at National Museum of Natural History's
struck gold with an idea she suggested to SkyTruth.
Katja has altogether too much education and experience. She did Tree of Life work before coming to Smithsonian. (She's way too smart for web blither.) Her strategy is K.I.S.S. simple:
Build a Before/After image warehouse:
- Collect images of the Gulf Coast now. Identify date, time, and shooting location.
- Recreate the same images after ecological changes occur.
Can we call this:
Schulz's EOL system could support an EOGulf project. Add spacial/mapping data and adopt USCGS standards. Google/site has an EOGulf stub.
The better to prepare for corporatist denials as with Exxon Valdez and Chernobyl. Tag these crimes like it was Abu Ghraib.
Greenpeace, SkyTruth and more BTF :::
Here is the central meme: contrast an EOL Model image library of the Gulf of Mexico littoral today with what will happen later.
When a Big Wind brings millions of gallons of crude oil ashore, the Oil Biz and their corporate media hacks will try to sell their 101 most Toxic Lies. Like the Exxon Valdez propaganda, crude oil will suddenly not be toxic. Despite that science has crude oil toxic at 5 parts-per-million, suddenly it will not be toxic.
Lies will be repeated over and over again.
Workers on the Exxon Valdez and Chernobyl sites were poisoned. Yet even today there are deniers, saying just about anything to support corporate irresponsibility.
Before/After images put paid to that.
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NOAA National Huricane Center is optimistic for the short term. Tropical storm # 3 is likely to peter out over Cuba.
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Cold, Deep and Slow Moving Oil
We know a few things. The most of the crude oil from BP's April 20th blow out at Deepwater Horizon has remained in a deep water circular current. This current is slow moving, counterclockwise cyclone current. The current is centered some 50 or 60 nautical miles southeast from the Louisiana offshore islands.
BP's 1,800,000 gallons of "dispersant" had the effect of freeing lighter chemicals from the mix. Heavier molecules are then slower to reach the surface. Predictions at a discussion with U. of F. and other participation ran to an estimate for 95% of it resurfacing within 5 years.
Bacterial consumption will be minimized for most of this period by the cold temperatures down below 500 feet.
When these 200,000,000 gallons of oil do come ashore, there will be wide ecological damage. Ecocide. While the crude oil remains in the Gulf's deep water currents, oceanic life will be destroyed
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I will call around for housing this EOGulf project. It would be better to have an existing organization run this Encyclopedia of the Gulf project. That is not necessary; resources are available.
Software is not a problem. This project requires about 1/1,000th of what NARA uses to run Presidential Libraries.
Google works fine. Oracle works. OEM free software from Canon, Nikon or Pentax will integrate automatically from what I'm told.
We need to be able to integrate existing collections (technically, "subinventories" for staging and data warehouse processing) so that volunteer photographers can include their truly priceless visual records.
We need to be able to identify shooting locations to facilitate the After recreations. GPS is convenient. Google Maps is also useful -- good enough.
I ran off a PERT Chart for the project.
Somehow it doesn't seem that recruiting volunteers and getting image collections and "fill in" new images are going to be problems.
Planning ahead to do efficient After images -- that's a big problem. If we had 100 volunteers to go in after a hurricane, not sure if that could do it ? Getting things done right might take 1,000 volunteer-days. Asking a lot of people... to put in that much time for something after a major hurricane.
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Skytruth links to Oil Spill News links to WaPo:
Before rig explosion, BP pumped chemical mixture into well, contractor says
WaPo link
"The injection of the dense, gray fluid was meant to flush drilling mud from the hole, according to the testimony before a government panel investigating the April 20 accident. But the more than 400 barrels used were roughly double the usual quantity, said Leo Lindner, a drilling fluid specialist for contractor MI-Swaco.
BP had hundreds of barrels of the two chemicals on hand and needed to dispose of the material, Lindner testified. By first flushing it into the well, the company could take advantage of an exemption in an environmental law that otherwise would have prohibited it from discharging the hazardous waste into the Gulf of Mexico, Lindner said."
What else would a sensible person expect ?
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Greenpeace update:
Greenpeace's simple statement:
"There's no way to clean up an oil spill."
D'oh.............................
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This Before/After Document idea from Katja Schulz for the GoM could turn into one helluva game changer.
We do not have a comprehensive image database for the Exxon Valdez slaughter or for Chernobyl. We do not have it for the environmental wreckage in East Germany or Poland or today's China. What we have it catch as catch can.
We can get documentation done for the Gulf.
What else ???
Yesterday's diary is here:
BP Ecocide v14.0: Fake Command Center Pics Admitted
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