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Mount Redoubt Volcano and the Drift River Oil Terminal
/1 Comment/in Oil Spill /by John AmosMaybe in retrospect it wasn’t such a great idea: storing six million gallons of crude oil next to a major waterway, just a few miles downstream from an active volcano with a recent history of explosive violence. But that’s just what the oil industry has done in the state of Alaska. The Chevron-operated Drift River […]
Urban Growth: Las Vegas 1984-2009
/1 Comment/in Oil & Gas /by John AmosNot everything that happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas: the city has seriously bulked up in recent decades, something that is very obvious from space. In honor of the Landsat-5 satellite’s jaw-dropping 25th year of operation, NASA has released images taken from 1984 to 2009. The population of Clark County, home of Las Vegas, quadrupled […]
Hurricane Ike – Collateral Damage?
/1 Comment/in Gulf of Mexico, Incidents, Offshore, Oil & Gas, Oil Spill /by John AmosA 900-foot oil tanker carrying 41 million gallons of crude oil from the North Sea is in trouble in the northern Gulf of Mexico, about 65 miles from its final destination of Galveston, Texas. The SKS Satilla is listing because three of its ballast tanks were punctured. Nobody is sure yet what caused this sudden […]
Athabasca Tar Sands – No Day At The Beach
/in Oil & Gas /by John AmosNational Geographic’s latest issue has a timely article on the massive tar-sands mining operation that is chewing up large swaths of boreal forest in Alberta, Canada. It’s accompanied by a stunning online photo gallery and video. This heavy-oil extraction process ranks right up there with mountaintop removal mining as one of the truly apocalyptic things […]
Fishing The Line: Do Marine Reserves Improve Fishing?
/1 Comment/in Fishing /by John AmosHere’s a blast from the past: a recap of one of the first projects SkyTruth ever conducted, a limited study of satellite imagery as a tool to demonstrate “fishing the line.” There is abundant anecdotal information that when an area of the ocean is closed to fishing, fish populations rebound and “spill over” into adjacent […]
AP: Hurricane Ike Environmental Toll Apparent
/in Gulf of Mexico, Incidents, Offshore, Oil & Gas, Oil Spill /by John AmosThe Associated Press reported “at least 448 releases of oil, gasoline and dozens of other substances into the air and water and onto the ground in Louisiana and Texas” as a result of storm damage and flooding of coastal facilities by Hurricane Ike. “The Minerals Management Service, which oversees oil production in federal waters offshore, […]