Oil & Gas

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AIS Ship Tracking Data Shows False Vessel Tracks Circling Above Point Reyes, Near San Francisco

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Analysis 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?

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SkyTruth’s West Virginia FrackFinder Datasets Updated

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Oil 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.

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Ten years ago SkyTruth Revealed the Truth about the BP Oil Spill

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SkyTruth video highlights our work fighting oil pollution, then and now.

Ten years ago last week, BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing 11 men and setting off the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. SkyTruth was there; not in person but remotely; using satellite imagery to track the spill from space. Watch our four-minute video to learn more about the disaster, and what SkyTruth is doing now to stop oil pollution at sea.

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What’s a Mathematician Doing at SkyTruth?

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Alice Foster discovered her love for geology at Brown University, and meandered onto SkyTruth’s path.

My name is Alice Foster, and I started as an intern at SkyTruth this past January. But my journey to SkyTruth was a bit unexpected. Until recently, I was somewhat unenthusiastic about science, although I was interested in conservation issues. But after a few minutes in my first geology class, I was hooked.

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New Intern Matthew Ibarra Shifts from Aerospace Engineering to Protecting the Planet from Space

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Matthew thought he wanted to be an aerospace engineer when he started college. Then he learned more about environmental damage to the planet.

My name is Matthew Ibarra and I am a new intern at SkyTruth. Originally I came to West Virginia University to study mechanical and aerospace engineering. However, as my time at WVU went on I became much less interested in engineering. I developed a passion for renewable energy and decided I wanted to shift my focus of study and work on environmental challenges.

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