Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/27856
Terra Incognitae and the BP Oil Spill THE “G” IN GIS T here’s no doubt that 2010 will go down in history as the year of the leaks. From April to December 2010, the world’s media and blogosphere were saturated with news and postings about BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the dumping of massive amounts of classi- fied government documents by Wikileaks. Geographers, and the geospatial BY DANIEL SUI community in general, were involved in both leaks (see “Author’s Note,” page 13), and geography and GIS are essential for understanding them. This column is devoted to the BP oil spill, and I’ll discuss the hidden geography lessons of Wikileaks in GeoWorld’s June 2011 issue. An Unprecedented Event On April 20, 2010, an explosion on the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 crew members, sparking the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history. In combination with the Texas City refinery explosion and the Prudohoe Bay oil spill, this marked the third serious incident involving BP in the United States in five years. It’s estimated that the amount of oil that was being discharged from the broken well was at more than 1.47 million gallons per day. On July 15, 2010, BP successfully stopped the flow of oil from the well- head, after spilling 190 million gallons (approximately 4.7 million barrels) of oil into the gulf over a period of three months. Because of the magnitude of the multiple ramifica- Daniel Sui is professor of geography and director, Center for Urban and Regional Analysis, The Ohio State University; e-mail: sui.10@osu.edu. 12 tions of the BP oil disaster, President Obama signed an executive order on May 21, 2010, to establish a commission to investigate the causes and consequences of the BP oil spill. On Jan. 11, 2011, the presidential commission released a 381-page final report detailing faults by the companies that led to the spill (www.oilspillcommission.gov). The panel found that BP, Halliburton and Transocean attempted to work more cheaply, which helped trigger the explosion and ensuing leakage. The report detailed the nitty-gritty engineering reasons at the micro level that led to the disaster, but fell short of presenting to the public an accurate assessment of the environmental, social and G E O W O R L D / M A R C H 2 O 1 1 economic impacts of this unprecedented disaster from local to global levels. Although the word geography was mentioned four times, maps were mentioned eight times, and six maps were used in the report. I believe that a more-explicit geographic perspective, coupled with cutting-edge geospatial technologies, would’ve enable the general public a better understanding of the disaster. The Unknown Distinctive from most other fields of study, geography as a discipline studies the dynamics of environment, society and human/environment interactions. One of geography’s defining characteristics is its attempt to synthesize the physical/environmental and human/ societal dynamics with state-of-the-art geospatial technologies, which have improved our understand- ing of the human/societal dynamics at a broader spatio-temporal scale. For example, several map mashups posted by users (www.google.com/crisisresponse/oilspill) pre- sented a vivid picture about what happened and the potential environmental and socio-economic impacts. Perhaps more importantly, to better understand the impacts of the BP oil spill and their complexity, remember another important geographic concept that’s often ignored these days: terra incognitae. Literally meaning “unknown territories,” use of the term terra incognitae reached its peak around the mid-19th century, according to Google’s n-gram viewer (based on a database of 14-million scanned books). Not surprisingly, as more “territories” were discovered and eventually mapped, the use of “terra incognitae” has been in decline since the mid-19th century and stayed flat since 1920. Our blind faith in science and technology leads us to accept an incomplete knowledge about the world that’s often partial and distorted. Princeton physicist John Wheeler said it beautifully when he reminded us that “as the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” In this age of knowledge explosion and information overload, it’s important to rekindle the concept of terra incognitae among the general public. Knowing that we don’t know completely is a higher level of understanding than accepting partial knowledge as the whole truth. In the case of the BP oil spill, the terra incognitae are vast, awaiting exploration. Many Barriers The terra incognitae of the BP oil spill exist for two obvious reasons. First, due to current scientific and technological limitations, it’s daunting to detect,