Oil Spill
How SkyTruth Investigates Environmental Incidents
How SkyTruth Investigates Environmental Incidents
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.
Trinidad and Tobago – the small dual-island Caribbean nation – has been a top exporter of liquefied natural gas for years. Because of its significant oil and gas exploration, and what some Trinidadians would call poor corporate and government responsibility, oil leakages from offshore infrastructure are very common events in Trinidad’s waters. With the help of satellite imagery, SkyTruth has been able to directly observe and continuously monitor Trinidad’s chronic oil pollution.
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.
Naomi Yoder works as a geospatial analyst for the environmental group Healthy Gulf identifying pollution events, tracking trends and pushing for reform to reduce pollution. “SkyTruth Alerts is so useful. I can’t say it enough.”
We’re often asked how we do our work here at SkyTruth, particularly when a major environmental event makes the news. Over the past few weeks the SkyTruth team has used tools available in SkyTruth Alerts along with vessel tracking data to investigate the Huntington Beach oil spill. In this blog post, we share how we investigated this spill, so that you can use the same techniques to monitor the places you care about.