Did you see the recent front page article in the Washington Post that featured SkyTruth’s work tracking a 14-year oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Why is Shepherdstown’s own SkyTruth featured so often in the international press? Come find out! Founder John Amos and key staff members Christian Thomas and Ry Covington will talk […]
In Appalachia, it is not uncommon to see the effects that mountaintop removal mining have on the surrounding ecosystems. As someone living in the great Mountain State of West Virginia, one of the projects that caught my interest when I started my internship at SkyTruth was their work mapping the extent of surface mines in […]
Today at 2:00 pm EST, the Open Access journal PLOS ONE published “Mapping the yearly extent of surface coal mining in Central Appalachia using Landsat and Google Earth Engine”. This paper, the product of a partnership between researchers at SkyTruth, Duke, and Appalachian Voices, provides the first comprehensive map of annual surface coal mining extent […]
After our discovery of what appeared to be a significant amount of mining taking place outside the permit boundaries provided by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP), we did a little digging to try and get a better idea of what exactly happened. With the help of colleagues at Appalachian Voices, we found […]
[The Mountain Top Removal visualization tool has been retired, but the MTR data is updated annually.] We were recently reviewing imagery of mine sites which experienced growth in 2017. We overlaid the mine permit boundaries that show where the government has legally granted companies permission to mine. We used our Landsat-based surface mining data to identify […]