Citizens monitor Gulf Coast after oil spill

MIT student Jeffrey Warren came up with an interesting way to document the Gulf Coast oil spill:

Hovering at 1,000 feet above the ground, Warren’s camera is able to take pictures with 100 to 1,000 times better resolution than…satellites, he said.

“There’s a lot of need for documentation on the scale of a person,” he said Wednesday from Louisiana, where he had just arrived to set up monitoring efforts with the help of local people and organizations.

“My hope is that some of this data will play a role in the litigation and the legal situation going forward,” he said.

Warren, who has been working on these “grassroots mapping” efforts for several months, is among a number of people and organizations trying to empower ordinary citizens to document the effects of the massive oil slick, which, according to the U.S. Coast Guard, has released more than 1.6 million gallons of crude into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.