Because oil and ice have different temperatures, heat signatures and reflective properties, combined IR-UV scanners can be used to differentiate between smooth water, ice and slicks.
In this world, PR firms expect that their clients will need more help in mopping up publicity slicks and, ideally, in preventing image blowouts before they occur.
Other analysts reckon the flow rate may be five or ten times higher, on the basis of video images from mini-submarines and the area and thickness of the slicks at the surface.
IT BEGAN with a worn-out tanker; became a series of gigantic oil slicks as the Prestige tore apart, and ultimately sank, off north-west Spain; then, as the heavy fuel oil slurped ever more widely ashore, it brought disaster to that region's many fishermen.
Over beers in his 20s, when he was churning out little yarns for middlebrow "slicks" such as the Saturday Evening Post, he would brag that he was better than all the greats, from Dreiser to Hemingway (though he allowed that Melville was pretty good).
Buddy was the working-writer Salinger, the man who had laboured in 1939-43 to get stuff into Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post, while all the time disdaining those slicks and lusting after the New Yorker which, in 1948, took him into its embrace.
Drilling stopped in the area in 1993 but today the people still live in dire poverty, in the middle of putrefying oil slicks, despite promises to clean them up.
These two men were not allies, but they have both become icons for the delta's biggest tribe, the Ijaw, many of whom say they get scant benefit from Nigeria's oil while having to live in a quagmire of oil slicks and gas flares.Neither man is an angel.
He gestures to the deathly-black banks still bearing the marks of the slicks.
The residual quarter is what has been gathered up from the beaches and what is still out at sea in slicks and tarballs, or buried in sediment.
BP also enlisted the help of robotic submersibles to discharge dispersants around the leak sites, and it hired local fishers to help enclose the oil slicks with booms.
