This New Mapping Project Drills Home the Threat of Fracking

It's seemingly everywhere: Fracking.

It’s gotten national attention with the possible approval of the Keystone Pipeline. It’s seen opposition from West Village residents who bristle at the prospect of a pipeline running underneath their homes. Its effectiveness has been debated against other energy sources. Fracking, the process of drilling into the ground to extract natural gas, is impossible to escape, and that’s probably because it poses threats to our already heavily-degraded environment. But thanks to a new project from remote-sensing map initiative SkyTruth, the practice is going to be even more difficult to ignore.

The “SkyTruthing” project FrackFinder is a crowd-sourced project to find, map, and track fracking sites in the Marcellus Shale region of the United States. FrackFinder uses satellite and aerial imagery to locate the sites, some of which have been active since the 1980s. The imagery helps SkyTruth complete three goals: identify the hotspots, track site activity from 2005 to 2013, and map the visible surface impact of the practice. According to the website, the group estimates that there are more than 100,000 sites throughout the country.

“At SkyTruth, we work hard to make the unseen impacts of pollution and industrial development visible to the public,” the website says. “This often means making maps.”

The SkyTruth team doesn’t have enough eyes or time to sort the images alone—a sobering fact in and of itself, since it means there’s a good amount of fracking sites—so they’re calling on volunteers. Through the crowdsourcing platform CrowdCrafting, SkyTruth is asking people to classify images to add to their database.

The first step of the project, TADPOLE, sorts through the 6,638 fracking sites that have developed in Pennsylvania over that past five years. “The goal of this phase is to confidently classify activity levels in 90-95% of all the images so we can focus on the 5-10 pecent that are ambiguous or need further expertise to analyze,” the site says. With 24 percent of the project completed, there are currently 829 more sites to classify. A ways to go, to be sure. But who knows, maybe by then Americans will know once and for all what the frack fracking is.