Recently at COP 28, we launched the beta version of Cerulean, SkyTruth’s long-awaited global monitoring system for ocean oil pollution and its possible sources. Cerulean is the first free, publicly available tool that maps and monitors ocean industrial pollution events and attributes them to specific actors using machine learning, cloud computing, and satellite imagery.
In 2023, SkyTruth introduced changes that expand the platform’s capabilities and provide additional monitoring opportunities. In this blog post, we’ll explore three new incident types added to SkyTruth Alerts – California Hazardous Materials Spills, Texas Oil and Gas Drilling Permits, and U.K. Oil and Gas Spills at Sea.
Over the last 19 months, SkyTruth has been working with investigative reporters from the Associated Press on a story that highlights the risks posed by aging vessels which are linked to offshore oil production.
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.
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.