The Oil Drum | Lessons Left Unlearnt From 2003 Gulf of Mexico Near-Spill: “Reading through some MMS reports, it seems that near-misses happen a lot.”

A good maritime law blog on the legal machinations surrounding the oil spill. As Brad says, “He begins each day with a summary of the relevant legal developments pertaining to the spill, then expands on them individually and includes hyperlinks to underlying documents.”

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So, this has been puzzling me for the last couple of days: Both IfItWasMyHome and Paul Rademacher offer the ability to overlay the latest geographic extent of the oil spill on a location of your choice. It’s a good exercise in geographic scale, but if they both source their data from NOAA on any given day, why do the maps look so different?

IfItWasMyHome.com June 4, 2010

Paul Rademacher Oil Spill June 3, 2010

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Are the American people and media so naive that they cannot discern between disaster and disastrous response? How many times must these things happen before they get it? America, keep this in mind as you go into another weekend (and Pistolette sums it up very nicely): “I didn’t blame Bush for Katrina, but for failing to act after. I don’t blame Obama for the oil spill, but for failing to act after.” Disaster prevention is one thing, while effective response is wholly another.

Burglars and terrorists should be careful not to use Google Maps if they plan on committing crimes in the state of Louisiana … a bill approved 89-0 by the Louisiana House will require that judges impose an additional minimum sentence of at least 10 years on terrorist acts if the crime is committed with the aid of an Internet-generated ‘virtual map.’ The bill, already approved by the Louisiana Senate, defines a ‘virtual street-level map’ as one that is available on the Internet and can generate the location or picture of a home or building by entering the address of the structure or an individual’s name on a website. If the map is used in the commission of a crime like burglary, the bill calls for the addition of at least one year in jail (PDF) to be added to the burglary sentence.

Because you have to case a joint the old-fashioned way, dammit, sitting outside in a sketchy van with binoculars! Not using this cold, heartless, new-fangled Internet!

I … hmmm … uhhhh … I don’t know where to start with this one. Nothing else of import on the legislative agenda? Conducting a terrorist act isn’t bad enough, you get 10 years, y’heard, 10 WHOLE YEARS EXTRA for using the series of tubes for reconnaissance. That the Louisiana legislature should encourage the use of Google Maps for such activity because it will most likely send the would-be criminal to the wrong location? The bill was approved 89-0 in the LA House after passing the Senate; are all of the state’s elected representatives tech-illiterate geezers?

For the love of justice, David Vitter is giving away the keys to the castle and you’re worried about common criminals and imagined terrorists using digital cartography?

I suggest an amendment to the bill that jails people for geolocating their home addresses for others and then blasting to the world when they’re away from home. If you’re that stupid, you need to be put away for your own good.

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While its idiot politicians waste taxpayer money, the rest of Louisiana fights the good fight in the throes of deep, horrifying, sickening despair. From Charlie Mac and His Junk Shots, a remake of the musical classic Jambalaya (On The Bayou):

Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me o my o
Oil slick come and it’s as big as Ohio.
BP says they gonna clean the mess but they lie-o
Son of a gun, oil by the ton on the bayou.

St. Bernard gonna take it hard, and that’s a shame-o
Plaquemines just can’t win, and who’s to blame-o?
Big oil slick make the little fish sick, kill the game-o
Son of a gun, they got us on the run on the bayou.

There’s a difference, senator, between Accidents Happen and The Accident Is Still Happening 21 Days After And Nothing Can Stop It.

BP is now attempting a smaller Macondome, giving me the impression it’s time someone else took over this operation. The Department of Interior under both Bush and Obama is a hot, zero-oversight mess (even the Government Accountability Office is scared). Meanwhile, southeastern Louisiana is done for.

NOAA’s spill location forecast for 6pm CDT today:

University of Southern Florida Ocean Circulation Group’s spill trajectory hindcast/forecast based on West Florida Shelf ROMS for 4pm CDT tomorrow:

The oil spill on New York City (and New Jersey and New York state and Connecticut):

The oil spill on Chicago (and Gary, IN and Lake Michigan into Michigan):

On Houston (D notes that the eastern arm spill stops just short of the Louisiana border):

Marion Laney, a realtor on Dauphin Island, has uploaded the following video from the Ocean Circulation Group at University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science. It uses drifters tracked by satellite to follow and forecast the movement of the Gulf Gusher (note that this is based on one model, like in hurricane tracking). The modeled circulation resembles a starfish with two arms stretching south and eastward over time. If you think Louisiana’s problems are only in the Breton/Chandeleur area, though, check out that one arm circling the peninsula to the west and headed up towards Barataria Bay. Bad news.

Flowing Data | Where Bars Trump Grocery Stores: “Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.” Actually, it’s just Wisconsin that does. Central Minnesota, Chicago and southeast Illinois lightweights need not apply.

2. USA Today Science Fair | Tectonic Plate Model Lets Users Play With 3D Planetary Puzzle

Dubbed MORVEL, for Mid-Ocean Ridge VELocity (because much of the data comes from the mid-ocean ridges) it was created by University of Wisconsin-Madison geophysicist Chuck DeMets and collaborators Richard Gordon of Rice University and Donald Argus of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

MORVEL lets allows users model the relative movements of 25 interlocking tectonic plates that account for 97 percent of the Earth’s surface. It’s being presented in the April issue of Geophysical Journal International and is based on work the scientists have been doing for the past 20 years.

A dynamic three-dimensional puzzle of planetary proportions! Chuck was on my MS thesis committee and we used older versions of MORVEL in our graduate geophysics classes. Glad to see this great research and teaching aid get the attention it deserves.

The following map shows all 963 earthquakes between January 1st, 2010 and today.

In two months, a tiny fraction of a percentage of a blink of the geological eye, there were almost a thousand recorded movements of the lithosphere.  They nicely outline Earth’s plates and some intra-plate activity: Oceans subducting under continents, the mid-Atlantic rift quietly creating new crust, the furious Pacific Ring of Fire, the East African Rift, India ramming away at Asia and America unraveling at the Basin and Range.  The Earth is alive and doing its thing.  Earthquakes aren’t oddities, they are the natural norm.  Never forget that.

Next up are all earthquakes above Magnitude 5.0 for the same time frame.  These make up a third of all earthquakes in the last two months.

The IRIS Earthquake Browser uses the Google base map and interface, so you can zoom in on particular earthquake-hit regions and look at satellite imagery & terrain data along with regular map view.

I urge everyone to donate as much as they can to the victims of the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, and also ask you to take an objective stance towards why natural disasters happen.  As I explained to my physician brother who was concerned about the frequency and severity of recent earthquakes and attendant natural disasters, think of the earth as the human body, i.e. it’s all inter-connected and there is a perfectly plausible reason for all “ailments,” even ones we don’t yet fully understand.

Let’s use Haiti and Chile themselves as examples.  Haiti is an impoverished and deforested former French island colony sitting on the steep, clayey soil over an active strike-slip fault which just moved in a catastrophic manner in the lead-up to the rainy and hurricane seasons.  I hope to still be alive when the nation is rebuilt and recovers from its ongoing and upcoming physical, emotional and social trauma.  The geographic shape of Chile could not have been fashioned more disastrously by God himself.  The nation parallels an active subduction zone to the west and a highly-explosive mountain range to the east.  When were this earthquake and associated tsunami NOT going to happen?  (As it happened half a century before.  And how long until the Andes let one loose?)  Thankfully, Chilean buildings are more sturdy in build and the earthquake occurred offshore and not directly underfoot as in the case of Haiti.  This also highlights the difference between the magnitude and intensity of an earthquake and why a 7.0 in Haiti wreaked more havoc than an 8.8 in Chile.  Again, this time around, the generated tsunami did not take as many lives as in 2004.

Each new natural and unnatural disaster definitely weakens our collective will, but it’s not an excuse for brain rot.  This is why I’m glad to be alive in the internet age.  We use this interconnectedness to give and get help, hope and knowledge.  Vive Haiti. Vive Chile.

JPL’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) False-Color Composite Image Of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.  Check out the mondo east-west fault scarp on this baby.

Spatial Sustain | A call for a coordinated and conflated mapping effort between OpenStreetMaps and Google MapMaker in light of the Haitian earthquake.  “Not surprisingly, the two data sets don’t match, and the question becomes what data is correct and how can the data be conflated to create a unified and accurate map.”

The Rumpus | “No one will ever know an actual death toll because no one is counting the bodies.”

JAN 15TH PM UPDATES

* BBC’s Jonathan Amos | How Satellites Are Being Used In Haiti: How geospatial science and technology can and do help during disasters

* Slashdot | Tech NGO’s Working In Haiti: Please also give to Télécoms Sans Frontières which “brings mobile telecom rigs and satellite phones to disaster sites, making sure that responders on the ground can communicate with each other and that individuals can contact families abroad.”  Their donation site is super-slow, so please be patient.

JAN 15TH AM UPDATES

* New York Times Interactive Map: Use the slider to compare before and after satellite imagery of key buildings in Port-Au-Prince.  Good job, NYT!

* Servir Maps: Damage assessment (before and after) maps and a good preliminary assessment of erosion/landslide potential.

* John McQuaid | Why Haiti Is Not New Orleans: “Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake are fundamentally different. That many people are lumping them together shows how superficial and ignorant we collectively remain about disasters – and also why we never do an adequate job of preparing for them.”  Wonderful essay, I encourage you to read all of it.  Haiti needs the spotlight on its disaster in itself, and not for the global media to make wrong and useless comparisons to other disasters when idiot armchair critics far away can do that all by themselves.

USGS ShakeMap, which maps the intensity and acceleration of ground shake, for Haiti

JAN 14TH 2010 PM UPDATES

* If you want to donate money to Haiti, check first with Charity Navigator, which “works to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of over 5,400 of America’s largest charities.”

* Lt. Gen. Russell Honoré: “[The United States military helping repair] the seaport at Port-au-Prince and keeping the airport open are key to bringing in equipment, food, water and medicine.”

JAN 13TH 2010 PM UPDATES

* Give the Red Cross $10, to be charged to your cell phone bill, by texting “HAITI” to “90999.”  It’s legit, but don’t know whether and how much of that money will go to Haiti.

* Ushahidi has setup an SMS shortcode to report on the ground information: +44 7624802524 or email haiti@ushahidi.com (via CrisisCommons)

* Chris Rowan explains the tectonics of the quake.  Learn all about complex Caribbean plate interaction and the Gonave microplate.  Haiti sits where the boundary between the Caribbean and North American plates turns from convergent in the east (Antigua, Dominica) to strike-slip in the  north.  This earthquake is a perfect example of plate interaction in transpression, which means that each side of the fault zone moves horizontally and in the opposite direction relative to the other, but there is also a contractional/shortening component in the vertical plane.

* LiveScience conducts a Haiti earthquake seismology Q&A.

* Create a CrisisCommons wiki account and contribute useful aid maps and links there.

* Hard to do this without a data line and a GPS unit, but here’s the OpenStreetMap earthquake response so far.

* Juan Cole @ Informed Comment suggests how Wall Street could help Haiti and partially redeem those bonuses.

JAN 13TH 2010 AM

* The Daily Mail has a good roundup of the situation on the ground.  True/Slant has more.  Words you never, ever want to read: “One of Port-au-Prince’s main hospitals was destroyed in the quake.”

* SFGate’s Updated Donation List and Information – I’ve traditionally donated to the International Committee of the Red Cross and/or Doctors Without Frontiers because a large amount of that money goes to actual health aid rather than administrative overhead.

Last night, I made a 2009 United States county-specific unemployment map using Flowing Data’s How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools tutorial.  All you need is a Python installation, the BeautifulSoup XML parser, a good text editor and some patience to debug.  (Another reason I like Nathan: He codes in Python, the best, most intuitive programming language out there!)

These are the results, admittedly without a legend (bad Maitri!), which I will work on in Photoshop.  So you know what you’re looking at here, the lightest color is 0% unemployment and steps up from there in 2% increments, with the darkest color denoting 10+% unemployment.  This data was downloaded from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

1. The Flowing Data original reproduced:

2. Diverging colors (blue=low; red=high)

3. Sequential colors (white=low; orange=high; black=+10%).  The darker the hues, the more trouble folks have telling them apart.  Black shows the worst hit spots and provides a backdrop with which to differentiate between the other colors

Check out the original Unemployment, 2004 To Present to see how bad things have become just in the last two years. This isn’t news, but just as well when you look at it in a county-by-county color graphic.  The nation is indeed bleeding.  Let’s make more casinos at home and start more land wars in Asia!