SkyTruth, in partnership with Appalachian Voices, documented the impact of mountaintop removal mining for coal over a 59-county area in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee and Virginia. The goal of the project was to map the direct landscape impact — the “footprint” — of mountaintop removal mining (MTR) over a 30-year period, from 1976 to 2005. […]
File this under “you gotta be kidding me” — tailings (waste rock, mud, etc.) from the massive open-pit Grasberg copper/gold mine in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, are actually dumped right into the river system. It’s called “riverine tailings disposal.” Sounds very sophisticated. When the fast-flowing mountain streams hit the forested lowlands, though, they slow down and […]
At SkyTruth we focus on creating images from satellite and aerial imagery that shed light on environmental concerns, especially landscape- and ecosystem-altering activities such as oil and gas drilling, mining, and deforestation. Many citizen’s groups, large and small, use our work to help raise awareness of the problems and issues they’re confronting. Every so often […]
How’d you like to have a fast-growing open-pit gold mine in your neighborhood? That’s a serious question facing the folks in Paracatu, in the Minas Gerais state of eastern Brazil. Gold mining there has occurred since the early 1700’s, but really kicked into high gear with full-scale open-pit mining beginning in the 1980s, becoming the […]
We’re finding some interesting things with the FEMA flood data. Yesterday it was coal-combustion waste storage in high-risk flood zones; today it’s uranium mill process wastes: The Cotter Corporation, a subsidiary of General Atomics, began operating a uranium mill on the outskirts of Canon City, Colorado, in 1958. Liquid wastes containing radionuclides and heavy metals […]