The Remote Sensing of Oil Slicks — 1989

How do you find an oil spill when you're hundreds—or thousands—of meters above it?

The Remote Sensing of Oil Slicks captures a particularly interesting moment in the history of environmental monitoring: the development of technologies capable of detecting and mapping petroleum pollution from aircraft and satellites.

Published in 1989, the book collects the proceedings of an international meeting organized by London's Institute of Petroleum in May 1988. Contributors examined technologies including airborne sensors, radar, infrared detection and laser fluorosensing, along with their use in identifying, mapping and monitoring oil on water.

The timing is notable. The conference occurred less than a year before the Exxon Valdez oil spill of March 1989 dramatically demonstrated the enormous environmental consequences of marine petroleum spills. Remote sensing would become an increasingly important part of detecting and assessing such disasters; subsequent technical literature continued to cite this volume's work on oil-spill sensing.

Rather than simply documenting petroleum extraction, this volume represents the scientific infrastructure being developed to detect and understand its environmental consequences. Its chapters provide a snapshot of what researchers could see from the air and from space at the end of the 1980s—and what they hoped the next generation of sensors would make possible.

Details: The Remote Sensing of Oil Slicks: Proceedings of an International Meeting Organized by the Institute of Petroleum and Held in London in May 1988. Edited by A. E. Lodge. Published on behalf of the Institute of Petroleum by John Wiley & Sons, 1989. First edition. Hardcover. ISBN 0-471-92043-6.

Condition: Former institutional/library copy, with spine label and handwritten catalog notation visible. Blue cloth hardcover appears structurally sound with light shelf wear. No dust jacket shown. See photographs for exact condition.