A colleague pointed me to an announcement from the Environment News Service about how bottom trawling (an industrial fishing practice that scars the seafloor) is visible from space! Witness the above, a Landsat image taken off the coast of Louisiana (admittedly, in 1999, but there are many more images where that came from).

The images come from Skytruth, a non-profit organization that uses “remote sensing and digital mapping to educate the public and policymakers about the environmental consequences of human activities, and to hold corporations and governments to higher standards of accountability around the globe.” I saw a presentation by these folks at the International Symposium on Digital Earth, and in fact, I blogged about them at that time. Great work…