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Alice Foster’s Internship Triggered New Excitement About Her Career Possibilities
/in Bilge Dumping, Biodiversity, Climate, Freshwater, Internship, Mining, Mountaintop Mining, Oceans /by Alice FosterBefore her internship, Alice felt burnt out at school. After applying new skills and technologies to environmental projects at SkyTruth, she’s looking forward to her remaining classes and a fulfilling career.
As Alice wraps up her four-month internship at SkyTruth, she shares some highlights and takeaways from her experience. During her internship she explored the field of geospatial technology for the first time. She learned about global environmental issues that she hadn’t known existed. And she got to work with — as she puts it — a kind, dedicated, creative group of people.
Right-sizing Our Data Pipeline to Detect Polluters
/in Bilge Dumping, Biodiversity, Oceans /by Jona RaphaelHow does SkyTruth’s new project Cerulean reduce the time and cost of processing enormous volumes of satellite information?
Project Cerulean is SkyTruth’s systematic endeavor to curb the widespread practice of bilge dumping, in which moving vessels empty their oily wastewater directly into the ocean.
SkyTruth Board Member Mary Anne Hitt: Activist Extraordinaire
/in Biodiversity, Climate, Freshwater, Mining, Mountaintop Mining /by Amy MathewsMary Anne Hitt has led Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign to extraordinary national success. But she honed her skills in Appalachia, with a little help from SkyTruth.
You might say Mary Anne Hitt has Appalachian activism in her blood. When she was growing up in Gatlinburg, Tennessee her father was Chief Scientist at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Back then, acid rain was decimating high elevation forests in the East, fueled by pollution from coal-fired power plants. Her father watched as iconic places in the park turned into forests of skeleton trees. Today, Mary Anne is National Director of Campaigns for the Sierra Club; and she also serves on SkyTruth’s board of directors.
AIS Ship Tracking Data Shows False Vessel Tracks Circling Above Point Reyes, Near San Francisco
/in Biodiversity, Climate, Oceans, Oil & Gas, Overfishing and Illegal fishing /by Bjorn BergmanAnalysis from SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch shows ship tracks jumping thousands of miles from their true locations.
In December of 2019 SkyTruth reported on a number of locations on the Chinese coast (mostly oil terminals) where ship tracking positions from the automatic identification system (AIS) became scrambled as soon as ships approached within a few miles of a point on shore. Following the findings last year on the Chinese coast, analyst Bjorn Bergman began looking globally for any similar patterns in AIS tracking data around the world. While he hasn’t found the precise pattern observed at the Chinese oil terminals outside of China, he has found a somewhat different false AIS broadcast pattern which appears concentrated above Point Reyes northwest of San Francisco, California. Could this reflect an intentional disruption of the underlying global positioning system that AIS relies on, or is there some other explanation for this pattern?
SkyTruth’s West Virginia FrackFinder Datasets Updated
/in Biodiversity, Climate, FrackFinder, Freshwater, Hydraulic Fracturing, Natural Gas, Oil & Gas /by Brendan JarrellOil and gas drilling activity in West Virginia continues to expand.
For more than a decade, SkyTruth has been tracking the footprint of oil and gas development in the Marcellus and Utica shale basins in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio through our FrackFinder project. Today, we’re excited to announce our latest updates to our West Virginia FrackFinder datasets.
Bilge Dumping at Sea: What are SkyTruth and others doing about it?
/in Bilge Dumping, Biodiversity, Internship, Oceans /by Tatianna EvaniskoWith free public monitoring services and the help of watchdogs globally, bilge dumping can come to an end. SkyTruth’s new project Cerulean is one solution.
Throughout this multi-part series on global bilge dumping, we have revealed how SkyTruth has identified oily pollution from ocean-going vessels, the range of harmful effects to coastal communities and marine ecosystems, and the challenges in prosecuting ocean offenders. We now address the future. What’s next?