Bilge Dumping

New Partnership Unites Marine Governance Advocacy and Tech to Defend Indonesian Waters

November 9, 2022/in Bilge Dumping, General, Oceans, Offshore, Protected Area Monitoring /by Joel Goldberg

SkyTruth and Indonesia Ocean Justice Initiative join forces to catch ocean polluters, improve compliance, and strengthen enforcement

SkyTruth’s efforts to hold ocean polluters accountable just received a big boost in Southeast Asia. SkyTruth and the Indonesia Ocean Justice Initiative (IOJI), an environmental policy think tank based in Jakarta, have established a formal collaboration to detect chronic oil pollution from vessels in Indonesian waters.

That’s not Atlantis, it’s just a bunch of human-made structures at sea

March 31, 2022/in Bilge Dumping, Flaring, Gulf of Mexico, Oceans, Offshore, Offshore Drilling /by Breanna Xiong

SkyTruth’s offshore infrastructure dataset can help identify areas at high risk of oil pollution events.

Although anyone can go to Google Maps and find most buildings in the world, we can’t do the same for infrastructure at sea. SkyTruth and our partners at Global Fishing Watch were inspired by this problem and created a dataset that allows us to locate offshore infrastructure. By applying three criteria, intern Breanna Xiong identified structures that have a high, medium, or low likelihood of being related to oil and gas production. This can make monitoring for oil pollution and identifying sources more efficient, and support SkyTruth’s project Cerulean.

Oil pollution in European waters: It’s worse than you think

March 23, 2022/in Alerts, Bilge Dumping, Cerulean, Climate, Conservation Vision, Oceans, Oil Spill /by Jona Raphael

SkyTruth helped investigative journalists report on the extent of the offshore oil pollution problem in Europe.

For the past eight months, SkyTruth has been working with a team of journalists and media outlets associated with Lighthouse Reports investigating the problem of chronic (and often illegal) oil pollution by vessels at sea transiting European waters. These outlets recently released a groundbreaking series of stories. In this blog post we explain how SkyTruth developed the estimates used by these journalists to reveal the extent of oily bilge waste in European waters.

Twenty years of SkyTruth success

December 21, 2021/in Bilge Dumping, Biodiversity, BP, Climate, Coal, Conservation Vision, Deepwater Horizon, Fishing, General, Gulf Monitoring Consortium, Gulf of Mexico, Hydraulic Fracturing, Impact stories, Mining, Mountaintop Mining, Oceans, Oil & Gas, Oil Spill, Overfishing and Illegal fishing, Protected Area Monitoring, Public Lands, SkyTruthing, Watchdog, Wildlife Conservation /by Amy Mathews

Satellite technology has changed but SkyTruth remains true to its core principles, with an impressive track record of holding industries and governments accountable.

As 2021 draws to a close, SkyTruth is celebrating its 20th anniversary as an environmental tech nonprofit. It’s hard for us to believe how far SkyTruth — and technology — have come in those 20 years, and how much we have accomplished. In 2022 we’re poised to grow even more; doubling the size of the SkyTruth team and magnifying our ability to use technology to promote conservation for people and the planet. Read on to join us on our journey from very humble beginnings to high-tech innovators.

Jona Raphael: Small town, big perspective

September 16, 2021/in Bilge Dumping, Biodiversity, Climate, Oceans, Oil & Gas, Oil Spill, Team /by Amy Mathews

SkyTruth’s machine learning engineer, Jona Raphael, grew up in Shepherdstown, West Virginia; SkyTruth’s home base. But it was his travels around the world that convinced him to knock on our door.

“I’ve always had an interest in sustainability,” Jona says. At SkyTruth, that interest translates into developing Cerulean, a machine learning model that automatically processes thousands of satellite images a day to detect oil pollution in the ocean,

Archive for category: Bilge Dumping

SkyTruth and Indonesia Ocean Justice Initiative join forces to catch ocean polluters, improve compliance, and strengthen enforcement

SkyTruth’s offshore infrastructure dataset can help identify areas at high risk of oil pollution events.

SkyTruth helped investigative journalists report on the extent of the offshore oil pollution problem in Europe.

Satellite technology has changed but SkyTruth remains true to its core principles, with an impressive track record of holding industries and governments accountable.

SkyTruth’s machine learning engineer, Jona Raphael, grew up in Shepherdstown, West Virginia; SkyTruth’s home base. But it was his travels around the world that convinced him to knock on our door.