Oil Spill

NASA Earth Observatory image modified by SkyTruth

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The Huntington Beach oil spill: How SkyTruth investigates environmental incidents

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SkyTruth Alerts is our go-to tool for monitoring and investigating incidents like the Huntington Beach Oil Spill.

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.

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Jona Raphael: Small town, big perspective

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SkyTruth’s machine learning engineer, Jona Raphael, grew up in Shepherdstown, West Virginia; SkyTruth’s home base. But it was his travels around the world that convinced him to knock on our door.

“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,

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Owning Up to Oil: Trinidad and Tobago

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Oil spills off Trinidad indicate chronic problems with infrastructure.

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.

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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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Bilge Dumping at Sea: Why should I care?

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Scientific research on the impact of oil pollution on marine life and coastal communities, combined with evidence of frequent bilge dumping, suggests oily bilge could be harming marine ecosystems and coastal economies.

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. 

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