Discover real natural events happening around our amazing planet right now!
Real-time oil spill and industrial disaster data from NASA EONET satellite monitoring
View on Globe →Not all environmental events are caused by nature. Oil spills, factory fires, and other human activities can release harmful substances into the air, water, and soil. Scientists track these events to help clean up the damage and protect people, animals, and the environment.
NASA includes manmade events in its EONET monitoring system when they have a significant environmental impact detectable from space — large enough to affect ecosystems, air quality, or water quality across a wide area. This makes Earth Explorer one of the few visualisation tools to show both natural and human-caused environmental events on the same globe.
NASA's MODIS instrument detects fires — including industrial fires, oil well burns, and large-scale waste burning — using thermal infrared sensors that can identify heat signatures even in remote or offshore locations. The MISR (Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer) instrument on the Terra satellite tracks smoke plumes from industrial events in three dimensions, allowing scientists to measure the volume and composition of emissions.
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites, including ESA's Sentinel-1, detect oil slicks on ocean surfaces with remarkable sensitivity. Oil dampens the small surface waves that normally roughen the ocean's surface, producing a distinctive smooth, dark signature in radar imagery. This allows scientists to map the extent of even thin oil films across hundreds of kilometres of ocean within hours of spill detection.
EONET only includes manmade events when they have a significant, satellite-detectable environmental footprint — routine industrial activity is not tracked. This means events appearing on Earth Explorer represent genuinely significant incidents that affected ecosystems, air quality, or water quality at a scale comparable to natural disasters.
Earth Explorer displays significant manmade environmental events tracked by NASA's EONET satellite monitoring network. Major oil spills, industrial fires, and other human-caused environmental incidents with measurable ecological impacts appear as glowing dots on the interactive globe.
View Live Manmade Events →NASA EONET includes a manmade event when human activity creates an environmental impact large enough to be detected by satellites — typically major oil spills, large industrial fires producing visible smoke plumes, pipeline explosions, or significant chemical incidents. Routine industrial activity is not included. Only events with a measurable environmental footprint at a regional or larger scale are tracked.
Oil spills into water, spreads rapidly across the surface (oil is less dense than water), and releases toxic chemicals into the air and water. Over days to weeks, oil weathers, breaks into smaller droplets, and is consumed by oil-eating bacteria — but this process is slow and incomplete. Cleanup involves containment booms, surface skimmers, dispersant chemicals, and shoreline manual removal. The full ecological recovery from a large spill can take decades.
Oil coats the feathers and fur of seabirds and marine mammals like sea otters and seals, destroying their natural insulation and waterproofing, causing hypothermia and drowning. Fish and shellfish — including their eggs and larvae — are killed by oil's toxic compounds. Loss of plankton and other small organisms cascades up the food chain, affecting species far beyond the spill's visible boundary. Some spill effects persist for decades in sediments.
Response includes containment booms to stop the slick spreading, surface skimmers to collect oil, chemical dispersants to break oil into tiny droplets that bacteria can digest, and controlled in-situ burning of thick surface oil. On shorelines, workers use high-pressure washing, sorbent pads, and manual cleaning. Despite enormous effort, some oil always enters sediments and deeper water, where it can remain toxic for years to decades.
Yes. Industrial fires can spread into events comparable in scale to wildfires. Explosions cause blast damage similar in area to small earthquakes. Dam failures cause devastating floods. Mining destabilises hillsides and triggers landslides. And burning fossil fuels over many decades is now driving climate change that intensifies virtually every category of natural disaster — making wildfires more severe, droughts longer, hurricanes more intense, and sea levels higher.
MODIS detects industrial fires and oil well burns using thermal infrared sensing. MISR tracks smoke plumes in 3D from industrial events. SAR satellites like Sentinel-1 detect oil slicks on ocean surfaces by the smoothing effect oil has on ocean surface waves. Together these instruments make human-caused environmental events visible from orbit, feeding into EONET and the Earth Explorer globe display.