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“An oil spill is a crime scene,” says Christopher Reddy, but quite unlike the kind in TV whodunits, where fictional forensic whizzes help nail down perpetrators with an arsenal of lab tools. For Reddy, a chemist involved in analyzing oil spills, investigations take years, and do not always yield certain results. Reddy delivers a colorful account of his research, which includes an insider’s perspective on the Deepwater Horizon spill. He confesses that not long ago he “was thinking about getting out of the oil spill business;” the incidence of big accidents “had dropped like a rock” since 1991. Then came news of the BP well blowout. He was invited on the scene to take water samples in the spring of 2010. Reddy shows video from underwater robots collecting oil from the leaking well head, and of the fierce flames from gas burning off nearby. “You couldn’t hear anything, and you could feel the heat on your skin. I’ll never forget it,” Reddy recalls. Reddy has long experience with tracking oil in the ocean and in the diverse coastal ecosystems where it comes ashore. He has learned that even 30 years after a spill, coastal marshes and shores that appear healthy often conceal toxic sludge that wreaks havoc on flora and fauna. Contrary to oil industry claims, sites don’t rebound easily. Accounting for the Deepwater Horizon crude (nearly 200 million gallons) and its impact on the ocean and coastal environments has meant taking countless samples, and tagging them chemically. Oil is made of thousands of compounds, “each with a different personality, or behavior, like a teenager,” says Reddy, and nature treats these diverse oils in different ways: “Some evaporate, some biodegrade, or break down with sunlight.” Reddy says, “I want to know who’s (in deep water now), who used to be, and why the other guy is on the surface.” This means “punching holes in the water collecting as many data points as possible.” The result of this work, involving hundreds of surveys by Reddy and oth...
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Video Length: 0
Date Found: January 09, 2011
Date Produced: January 09, 2011
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MIT World |
July 07, 2011
In three presentations that look back to digital-age milestones, and glimpse ahead to what may come next, speakers share some previously undisclosed stories, great enthusiasms, and a few concerns. Nicholas Negroponte tells a few “dirty secrets” about the start of the MIT Media Lab, including ...
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MIT World |
June 29, 2011
Winners of the A.M.Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing, describe their singular contributions to the field, and their works’ impact. They also find time to discuss the current and future state of computer science. Moderator Stephen Ward starts with 1990 prize winner Fernando Corbato, who ...
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MIT World |
June 13, 2011
Drew Davidson likes to play with blocks in his sandbox, as he demonstrates in a show-and-tell to interactive media colleagues. In this case, the playground is an online game called Minecraft, a two-year-young internet sensation with millions of followers, developed single-handedly by a ...
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MIT World |
June 06, 2011
Amy Bruckman finds the accomplishments of such online collaborations as Wikipedia, Apache and Firefox “nothing less than astounding,” and is both eagerly seeking and hoping to foster the next creative group Internet sensation. In her lab’s empirical studies, Bruckman has dissected different ...
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MIT World |
June 06, 2011
The ultimate questions for this Sandbox 2011 panel, posed by moderator Alan Gershenfeld, are “Where is technology not working? When is technology not the answer?” That’s a bold agenda for a panel of children’s media creators and a roomful of other producers in the industry, from Sesame ...
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