Offshore Oil Map
We continue to support WNYC’s 30 Issues in 30 Days coverage with a what may be the only interactive, zoomable map showing the estimated recoverable oil off the U.S. coast.
This is really the work of Stephen Reader, who found the data and turned it into a usable geographic file. That actually required some hand work, using the open-source mapping program QGIS, because some of the areas were outlined in a series of lines instead of full shapes, or polygons.
I ended up using QGIS to take Reader’s original KML file and shrink it down to a simplified version, which is easier to navigate online and still served our purposes.
Once again, we added rollovers to the map using Albert Sun’s fantastic gmap-features JavaScript program to turn the KML file into Google Maps polygon objects we could act upon.
- John Keefe
