The company is teaming up with the Environmental Defense Fund to help fight climate change, Engadget reports.
Although carbon dioxide gets the lion’s share of the attention when it comes to global warming, other factors cannot be ignored. According to the International Energy Agency, methane is responsible for about 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. About 40% of methane emissions caused by human activity are recorded in the energy sector.
To identify and reduce these emissions, Google has teamed up with the Environmental Defense Fund – the organizations have previously collaborated to create a map of methane leaks in major cities using sensors on Street View cars. The foundation and partners developed the MethaneSAT satellite, which is planned to be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in early March — it will orbit the Earth 15 times a day at an altitude of more than 200 km and will focus on measuring methane levels in the largest oil-producing regions.
Separately, algorithms were developed for calculating emissions and their distribution over time. Artificial intelligence will also be used to accurately identify oil and gas infrastructure facilities – similar to how Google uses this technology to identify sidewalks, street signs and road names in satellite images for Maps. Combining the methane map with the oil and gas infrastructure map is expected to provide a clearer picture of the emission sources.
MethaneSAT datasets will be available on Google Earth Engine, a platform for analyzing and processing geographic data, including satellite images (has approximately 100,000 monthly active users).
In previous news, we have already mentioned that Greenland is “melting” faster than thought – and is losing more than 30 million tons of ice per hour. With the retreat of the ice, the area of land with vegetation growing on it has increased by a total of 87,500 square kilometers, more than double the area at the time of the start of the study, and threatens even more greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise and landscape instability
According to The Guardian, the number of Greenland’s methane-producing wetlands has now nearly quadrupled. There are signs that the increase in the amount of vegetation leads to further loss of ice.
Previously, methane emissions due to the melting of glaciers were also recorded by scientists on the Svalbard archipelago.
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