Slick in Eugene Island Area, Gulf of Mexico - July 18, 2013

A Landsat-8 image taken yesterday shows a small, unreported slick in the Eugene Island area about 26 kilometers (15 miles) from the Louisiana coast.  About 10 km (6 mi) across, the slick covers about 33 km2.  Using our rule of thumb that, to be visible, a slick must be at least 1 micron thick on average, that amounts to about 8,700 gallons of oil or some oily substance:

Detail from a Landsat-8 satellite image (inset) taken on July 18, 2013, showing a small apparent oil slick (orange outline) in the Eugene Island area off the Louisiana coast.  Oil and gas platforms shown as small red dots. 

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[[Location:29.255927,-91.701613]]

Cuba Offshore Drilling Rig Spotted on Radar - Small Slick Reported

The big semisubmersible drill rig, built in China and now drilling a deepwater oil well for the Spanish company Repsol in the Florida Straits off Cuba (hey, it is a global industry), has finally made an appearance on a radar satellite image. This Envisat ASAR image, shot at 11:43 pm local time on March 30, shows a trio of very bright spots about 17 miles north-northwest of Havana.  We think the largest of these spots, with an interesting cross-shaped "ringing" pattern often seen on radar images of big, boxy metal objects, is the Scarabeo-9 rig.  The other two spots may be crew vessels or workboats:

Image courtesy European Space Agency.

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[[Location: 23.374496,-82.492283]]

Taylor / 23051 Chronic Leak Site in Gulf: Oil Analyzed

Back on September 15, a team from National Wildlife Federation piled onto a small boat on the Louisiana coast.  Their destination: the chronic leak site about 12 miles offshore where a cluster of wells operated by Taylor Energy has been steadily spilling oil into the Gulf since 2004.  Check out this aerial video of the site, shot by On Wings of Care on December 9, 2011.

Their objective: to collect samples of the Taylor oil slick for analysis, to see if it's chemically distinguishable from the oil that gushed from BP's infamous Macondo well about 30 miles away.  We wanted to know if other samples of oil collected in this region of the Gulf, on beaches and barrier islands and from slicks observed offshore, could possibly be coming from the Taylor site since it's a well-documented source of oil pollution. 

The upshot:  oil leaking from the Taylor site should not easily be confused with relatively unweathered oil from the Macondo disaster.  But it would be very helpful to collect more and better samples from the slicks being observed in the vicinity of the Macondo well site. [Read more....]

 [[Location: 28.938022, -88.970963]]