Longstanding nonprofit organization SkyTruth has just unveiled a new tool for monitoring pollution in Earth's vulnerable oceans: the software platform Cerulean.
TechCrunch reports that for over 20 years, SkyTruth has been a watchdog on the lookout for environmental damage such as oil spills. In the past, it has used satellite imagery to identify and advocate for the environment in those cases.
However, there are now more satellites in orbit than ever before, taking pictures of the Earth more frequently — multiple times a day to multiple times per hour in some areas. These images are finally frequent and detailed enough to do something that organizations like SkyTruth have dreamed of: catching polluters in the act.
Enter Cerulean. TechCrunch reveals that the platform crunches data from satellites all over the world to not just spot oil spills in the ocean, but to identify their sources more quickly and accurately than ever before.
Oil spills can be huge and undeniable, like the BP Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010. But many are smaller leaks from the thousands of vessels traveling on the ocean every day. However, even small spills have serious effects, harming wildlife, contaminating seafood that we eat, and degrading into other toxic chemicals the longer they're left to sit.
Cerulean allows anyone — even laypeople — to find oil spills in close to real time, TechCrunch reports. The oil forms long, distinctive black lines on satellite images, or a series of dashes when a vessel is leaking intermittently. Once you locate one, you can rewind the image to identify ships in the area and find the source of the pollution.
Cerulean has already produced some fascinating results, TechCrunch reveals. Oil seeping naturally from the sea floor, which was previously thought to be responsible for half of all oil slicks, appears to only make up about 6% according to this new data.
Additionally, European officials confirmed only 32 slicks caused by humans in 2022, but SkyTruth's findings suggest there were actually around 3,000.
The Cerulean platform is still in beta, but it's already being put to use. Along with its partners, SkyTruth is using the software to monitor deepwater drilling and report leaks to local fishermen; push for change in Indonesian laws to hold businesses accountable for the country's frequent oil spills; and monitor the frequency and severity of spills in the U.K.
Cerulean has also helped the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense monitor offshore drilling operations for leaks and spills, per TechCrunch. "We're trying to fill an information gap to pursue litigation that will help communities go after compensation for the harm caused by these spills," said IAED attorney Santiago Piñeros Durán, according to the publication.
SkyTruth CTO Jason Schatz told TechCrunch that while no one has physically gone to check the oil slicks that Cerulean identified, many identifications have been made with high confidence.
"We have manually inspected satellite imagery at several hundred locations," he said. "We can never be perfectly confident of the composition of a slick using satellite data alone, but it is the best we can do at scale."
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