Earth Observation should be a must to get to know our planet better while exploring the outside. All efforts to explore Space are great, same as Earth Observation, but until 2023, only the 24.9% of seafloor has been mapped, meaning that most of the Ocean, one of the natural resources that we owe life to, remains unknown to us. It is an obligation for us to keep it safe, clean, and not take it for granted.
Many human actions have ended up polluting Oceans in one way or another:

• Space missions debris fall in the Ocean [1].
• Missile testing over the Ocean [2, 3].
• “Exploitation” has taken place over “exploration”, and accidents such as oil spills in waters are still occurring [4].
• Thousands of species in the marine flora and fauna are in danger due to human-made contamination.
  It should not be difficult to see that, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that garbage-made island three times the size of France, is a reflect of our passage on Earth. A signature that humanity has left, and is still leaving, while looking for a second “house” just because was not able to keep this one in good shape, respecting it.

Space is beautiful, deserves every minute to contemplate and explore. But so does our Ocean, and in general, every natural resource on Earth. Without Earth, we wouldn’t be able to explore what is out there. And without Oceans, there wouldn’t be an Earth as we know it.

But maybe is not late, same as space debris missions, ocean debris removal initiatives such as The Ocean Cleanup are well known for their international efforts in returning Oceans their purity.

Recalling previous blog post, some of the mentioned satellite technologies can be used to monitor Ocean pollution:

Microplastic detection with CYGNSS

CYGNSS main purpose is to estimate wind speed in tropical cyclones through GNSS-Reflectometry. GNSS-R is capable of measuring sea surface roughness, which is correlated with wind speed. University of Michingan researchers, however, have noticed discrepancies between the surface roughness and retrieved wind speeds as they took measurements over the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Thus, they observed correlations between anomalous wind speeds in regions where high surface roughness was expected, with areas of microplastic concentration [5].

Oil spill detection with Copernicus Sentinel 1

A German-Israeli research carried out by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Israel Oceanographic & Limnological Research (IOLR) developed an algorithm capable of detecting oil spills with Synthetic-Aperture-Radar (SAR) data from ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel 1 mission and machine learning.