Like a detective gathering clues, Itziar Irakulis Loitxate scans her computer monitor looking for yellow-colored clouds in satellite data that suggest the presence of methane, a pernicious greenhouse gas that can escape from the Earth when coal, oil and fossil gas are produced.
The 27-year-old Ph.D. student isn’t a detective but she may be the closest thing the world has to climate police. She’s one of the world’s foremost remote sensing scientists who uses satellite observations to identify some of the most damaging emissions. She uncovered and published a paper last year on a massive release of methane spewing from an offshore oil and gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico that eventually forced government-owned Petroleos Mexicanos to acknowledge a leak. Before that, she identified 29 pieces of equipment in the central Asian country of Turkmenistan leaking so much methane they had a similar climate impact as the annual emissions from all the cars in Alabama.
