“I’ve always had an interest in sustainability,” Jona says. At SkyTruth, that interest translates into developing Cerulean, a machine learning model that automatically processes thousands of satellite images a day to detect oil pollution in the ocean,
Although many people might not realize it, the small two-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago located off Venezuela’s east coast has been involved in the fossil fuel industry for over a century. While recent media attention has focused on a listing tanker off the coast of Trinidad, SkyTruth analysis of satellite imagery reveals that oil slicks around offshore oil and gas infrastructure throughout the region is common, threatening local fisheries, fishermen, and ecosystems.
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.
Last year SkyTruth reported 163 accounts of likely bilge dumping across the world, from Brazil, to the Mediterranean, to Southeast Asia and elsewhere. As we described in our recent post, bilge dumping is the illegal release of untreated oily wastewater from a vessel’s lower hull. This wastewater, or bilge, appears as an oil slick in the ocean, which eventually disperses and can migrate to vulnerable coastlines.
This is the first entry in a multi-part series revealing the significance of bilge dumping globally. SkyTruth has observed bilge dumping incidents around the globe many times since 2007. But in 2019, we started seeking out these incidents more systematically. In total, we found 163 slicks around the globe.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/skytruth/4835555232/in/album-72157623909364472/