What an oil spill looks like from space

With the debate about offshore oil drilling never far off the minds of some in Congress, and the Senate nearing another round of debate on energy and climate legislation, NASA provides an unexpected lesson: A satellite photo of an oil slick in the Timor Sea, quite visible from space.

"An oil well in the Timor Sea northwest of Australia has been leaking for more than a week," according to the NASA Earth Observatory. "Operators continue to wait for a new rig to be brought to the site so that they can drill a relief well and cap the leaking one. This image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on August 30, 2009, shows the Timor Sea and what are probably oil slicks about (155 miles) northwest of Western Australia."

Oil slicks are typically all but invisible. The dark oil matches the dark water too closely for a jaw-dropping image that illustrates the extent of pollution from spills. The key to capturing this image, according to NASA, is "sunglint":

"Sunglint is the mirror-like reflection of the Sun off the water. If the ocean were as smooth as a mirror, a sequence of nearly perfect reflections of the Sun would appear in a line along the track of the satellite’s orbit (Aqua orbits roughly south to north over the daylight side of the Earth). Because the ocean is never perfectly smooth or calm, however, the Sun’s reflection gets blurred as the light is scattered in all directions by waves. The blurred reflection gives the ocean surface a washed out appearance—the sunglint region.

"An oil slick dampens waves on the water’s surface, changing the way it reflects light. The smoothing of the waves can make the oil-covered parts of the sunglint area more or less reflective than surrounding waters (depending on the exact location within the sunglint area and the sensor’s viewing angle). In this image, captured on August 30, 2009, the dark patches in the water at the eastern edge of the sunglint are likely oil slicks; they are similar in appearance to other slicks that have been detected in MODIS images, and they are in the correct location (near the leaking oil rig)."

Here's a look:

Timor Sea Oil Slick - Zoom Out

Timor Sea Oil Slick - Zoom In

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