This oil fire burned for more than three weeks
next to a freshwater lake here, in Vaca Muerta, Argentina.
One of the world's largest deposit of shale oil and gas
and home to the Indigenous Mapuche people.
Six years ago, protests by Mapuche activists
and their supporters outside of government offices
in the region were met with tear gas.
Inside, an agreement was being approved
that would open up their land to the global
oil and gas industry.
Argentina's state-run
oil company YPF has operated these oil fields
in Vaca Muerta for decades. But the 2013 agreement
saw the US giant Chevron enter the region.
Chevron was followed by Shell, Total, ExxonMobil
and Pan American Energy, a subsidiary of BP.
Chevron began fracking for oil and gas here
in the Loma Campana oil field, but the ownership of
this land is in dispute. A 2015 government report
recognises the rights of a local Mapuche community
to this 40-square mile area which overlaps with
Chevron's oil fields. The report records
the buildings belonging to the local Mapuche community
called Campo Maripe. This structure is a
communal building known as a "ruca".
It was built in 2013 to monitor the activities
of the oil and gas companies in the area.
Just months later, the day after the protest
when the Chevron agreement was signed, the "ruca"
burned down in what the report called an
intentional fire. At that time,
there was only one extraction site in
the area. Less than a year later,
dozens of new extraction sites are visible across
the region.
Fracking produces large
quantities of toxic by-products which are stored and processed
at facilities like this one, which has grown substantially
between 2014 and 2018.
Local activists gathered
these images and videos which would form the basis
of a 2018 lawsuit which alleges that the facility
was putting the health of local communities in danger.
According to the lawsuit, half a million litres of
toxic waste arrives at the site every day from
nearby extraction sites. This video, taken by
a worker at the site, shows the pools in
which that waste is stored. The lawsuit alleges
that the conditions in which waste is stored
risks contaminating the local water supply
and violates local regulations.
It also claims that the
waste pools are less than the legally required
distance from the city of Añelo and
the nearby river.
Around the time
the lawsuit was filed, there was another
major oil spill at another site nearby
called La Caverna. A workers camp near
to the site was completely flooded with oil.
Oil leaked into the surrounding environment
for 36 hours. After footage of the
spill was published online, workers were banned
from taking smartphones onto the site.
The damage is visible on satellite images
for weeks after.
But activists shared videos
with us that documented other recent incidents
across the surrounding oil fields.
The rapid expansion
of the oil and gas industry in Vaca Muerta is visible
in this sequence of satellite images from 2013 to the present day.
Satellite sensors, which register changes in vegetation,
reveal sustained loss of vegetation during this time, seen here in yellow.
This environmental evidence supports the local Mapuche
community's claim that the oil and gas industry
has irreversibly damaged their ancestral homeland
and with it, their traditional way of life.