NOW ANALYSING
waiting for the first block
LAST BLOCKS
ENGINE LOG
One MacBook tearing through free Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, 20 km at a time, hunting methane super-leaks and illegal gold mining in the places nobody else is watching. Everything below is happening right now.
Validation regions run first: places with known leaks and known mining, to prove the detectors see what they should. Then the hunt, where the public monitoring maps are blank.
What the machine thinks is worth a human look. Nothing here is a confirmed finding until it has been checked by eye across several dates and against every public database. Mining locations are rounded to about 10 km on purpose; exact positions only go to investigators.
| ID | Type | Region | Where | Evidence | Status |
|---|
Methane absorbs shortwave-infrared light at 2.2 µm. Sentinel-2's band 12 sits right on that absorption and band 11 next to it doesn't, so a big plume shows up as a dark streak in the ratio of the two. For every 20 km block around oil and gas infrastructure the engine reads every clear pass from the last five months, builds a methane-free background from all of them, and flags plume-shaped deficits that start at a facility and come back on more than one date.
Before hunting, it reproduced published plumes: a 56 t/h leak and the 8.5 t/h Hassi Messaoud well-pad plume in Algeria from Varon et al. 2021. Hits are checked against UNEP's 5,900 verified plumes so known emitters are labelled, not claimed.
Can't see: leaks below roughly 2–3 tonnes per hour, anything over patchy farmland, forest or snow.
Artisanal gold mining strips the vegetation and leaves clusters of small, muddy settling ponds. The engine builds cloud-free composites of an old and a recent dry season for each block and flags patches where vegetation has gone and many new small ponds have appeared. Big industrial pits and single reservoirs don't match the pattern.
It targets areas with no open monitoring layer: the Senegalese side of the Falémé river, where mining within 500 m of the river is banned until 2027, and Sumatra, where illegal gold mining has grown roughly twentyfold since 2021. The Amazon and most of humid West Africa are skipped because they're already watched.
Can't tell legal from illegal on its own; that needs concession and protected-area maps and a human. Never published at exact coordinates.