Wyoming Range - Drill The Bridger-Teton National Forest? (Part 2 - 50 Acre Wellpads??)

But wait, there's more... Stanley Energy is also asking for Forest Service approval to drill for natural gas in the Wyoming Range. They want to drill from 8 locations just west of Merna, between Lookout Peak and Prospect Peak. They plan to drill multiple wells from each location, or "wellpad," which helps reduce the environmental impact...but they expect each wellpad to be 50 acres in size. How big is that? Well, the Pentagon covers 34 acres. Why so big? In the Gulf of Mexico the oil industry drills dozens of wells from a single platform less than 2 acres in size, in water a mile deep, to targets 3 miles below the seafloor.

We thought it would be useful to simulate what 50-acre wellpads might look like in the middle of a national forest. Check out our image gallery showing before-and-after pics of the site. And for the very first time, we've also created this simulation in Google Earth. Earth users can download the KMZ file here. Don't have Google Earth yet? Get it for free and then take a self-guided virtual tour of SkyTruth's simulation.

Back in October the Forest Service and Stanley signed a memo that some folks -- the governor of Wyoming among them -- claim gave Stanley too much influence over the decisionmaking process. This revelation has gotten a lot of local ink; check out coverage by the Sublette Examiner and the Jackson Hole News & Guide. Outdoors editor Shauna Stephenson at the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle started her column on this controversy by saying "I don't know about you guys, but I'm just about sick and tired of this garbage." The Casper Star-Tribune editorialized that the whole environmental study should start over. The Forest Service admits it made a big mistake and gave Stanley undue influence over the environmental study, but is continuing ahead with it anyway.

Meanwhile, Senator Barasso of Wyoming has carried on the cause of his predecessor, the late Senator Craig Thomas, and submitted a bill to protect 1.2 million acres of land in the Wyoming Range from future gas and oil leasing. The legislation was just approved by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and will come before the full Senate for a vote. With support from the Wyoming's governor and congressional delegation it's chances look pretty good. Existing oil and gas leases in the protected area -- including those held by Stanley Energy and Plains Exploration and Production -- will still be "drillable." But lease holders will have the option of voluntarily relinquishing those leases, and conservation groups will have the opportunity to buy leases and permanently "retire" them, an option that is normally not allowed. You can contact Senator Barasso to let him know what you think about the Stanley - Forest Service debacle, and his bill to protect a piece of the Wyoming Range.

Upper Green River Valley Time-Series Images

We've just added to our time-series of images showing the spread of drilling in the Jonah and Pinedale Anticline natural-gas fields, located on public lands in western Wyoming's upper Green River valley -- the southern part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The new images are SPOT XS satellite pics taken in September 12, 2006 and September 27, 2007. We've applied a "natural-color" process to these images so that vegetation will appear green and water blue, in keeping with the earlier Landsat images in these series. Drilling is booming in both fields, with new drilling plans released by the Bureau of Land Management last year that will add thousands of new wells to these fields.

Google Earth users, download the KMZ file for the Jonah Field to explore the roads, well pads, and other facilities in this area in 1-meter detail; the Google image was taken in August 2006.

Go here to learn more about drilling in this area and what you can do, and here to read more about SkyTruth's other work in the upper Green.

Google Earth Now Has Image Dates

Hooray! This is a great addition to the virtual sightseeing capability offered by Google Earth. Their just-released upgrade (version 4.3) allows you to see when the images were taken. As you move your cursor around the screen, the image date appears in the gray-shaded "status bar" at the bottom of the image:

Knowing the date of the imagery makes it a lot more informative. This example shows a large industrial facility (probably for processing natural gas) a few miles southeast of Farmington, New Mexico, in an area of intensive drilling for coalbed methane. The status bar indicates that this image was taken on March 26, 2007.

So get that free upgrade now and start globetrotting. And let us know what places you're concerned about.

Bottom Trawling: Sediment Plumes Visible From Space

I'm here in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). SkyTruth is part of a session looking at the impacts of commercial fishing on the oceans, specifically a technique called bottom-trawling. The trawlers drag heavy nets back and forth on the seafloor, flattening what's in their path and, where the ocean floor is muddy, sending big billowing clouds of sediment into the water. The amazing thing is this phenomenon is actually visible from space: a trawler, with its nets deployed, leaves a long and persistent trail of sediment in it's wake, not unlike a jet contrail:

We've built a public image gallery showing the sediment plumes generated by trawlers in the Gulf of Mexico, using both Google Earth and Landsat satellite images. We've also put together a virtual tour of this issue for Earth users. Today we took part in a press conference on this work; tomorrow we'll give a talk at the symposium. You can download our presentation here (mostly pictures, not a lot of words -- just the way we like it at SkyTruth).

But don't stop there: send us your Google placemarks and other image examples showing the impacts of trawling, other fishing techniques, and other forms of human impact to our oceans. Email us (info@skytruth.org) or submit a comment on this blog posting. We'll compile the submissions, credit the contributors, and post the results.

Preble's Meadow Jumping Mouse

Here's an animal you've probably never heard of. The Preble's Meadow Jumping Mouse is native to the eastern slope of the Rockies in Wyoming and Colorado. Unfortunately for the mouse, it lives exactly where many of us want to: nestled in the hills at the foot of those beautiful mountains. Urban sprawl is tough on this critter. Conservationists are trying to give the mouse a hand: in 1998 it was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, with "critical habitat" designated for protection in 2003. The attempts to protect the mouse and its habitat have been controversial, and in November 2007 the Fish and Wildlife Service "delisted" the mouse from protection in Wyoming, while reaffirming the protection in Colorado.

In partnership with Center for Native Ecosystems, SkyTruth decided to take a look at what's been happening in the "critical habitat" areas in Colorado. We overlaid those areas on the high-resolution satellite imagery in Google Earth, and found 25 places where development of some kind already existed or has since occurred within the critical habitat. The Google images are probably no more than a few years old; this example shows a new subdivision obviously under construction that is encroaching on a critical-habitat zone. It certainly looks like the mouse is losing the battle.

Google Earth users can explore this for themselves using the KMZ file we created. And all are welcome to browse our online image gallery: click on any image in the gallery to see a bigger version with a descriptive caption; then click on "Large" to see an even bigger pic.