See the project here.
The climate crisis, the most important story of our time, is profoundly difficult to cover visually with immediacy and originality. After all, greenhouse gases, the very cause of the crisis, are invisible.
But in 2019, The Times achieved something remarkable: We made the invisible, visible.
In a striking investigative project — one that immediately led to calls for federal investigation — journalists Hiroko Tabuchi and Jonah Kessel exposed “super emitter” oil and gas facilities intentionally releasing immense plumes of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, directly into the atmosphere. They captured footage of this hidden behavior, at sites across Texas in one of the world’s biggest oil fields, by mastering a highly unusual technology: A specialized camera that can “see” gases at invisible wavelengths. The complex device has a lens made not of glass, but of the metal germanium, and it is so advanced that its sensor must be cooled to minus-200 Celsius to function.
Mastering the camera required weeks of training for Mr. Kessel, and the resulting footage further required an in-house software team at The Times to write special code to produce video images.
But that was just one phase of this remarkable visual investigation.
First, Ms. Tabuchi spent months immersed in government and industry data working to understand why it was so difficult to spot “super emitters” in action and hold them to account. Next, armed with that knowledge, she and Mr. Kessel hired a tiny airplane packed with specialized sensors and took to the skies over west Texas for hour, skimming and circling just a few hundred feet above the oil fields and towering, burning flares that dot the landscape there, to pinpoint potential large-scale leaks to investigate.
The flights provided them with data indicating precisely where massive emissions were happening, in real time, including GPS locations. The two reporters quickly hit the road, driving deep into Texas oil country with their specialized infrared camera to see what it might reveal about the scope and volume of the leaks.
Their hard work was amply rewarded.
At site after site, their footage exposed massive releases shooting into the sky. It revealed billowing clouds of methane leaking through the walls of buildings. It even captured an oil field worker unwittingly walking directly into a methane plume leaking from an industrial storage tank. Methane is not only a major contributor to climate change, but also an immediate health risk to individuals exposed to it.
A word about the visual technology. The human eye can see light that is between only 0.4 and 0.7 micrometers on the electromagnetic spectrum, a relatively small sliver. But for this reporting, all the action was at infrared wavelengths of 3.2 to 3.4 micrometers, where the otherwise invisible methane could be seen. The camera allowed the reporters to make pictures of methane, though the resulting raw footage also required an in-house software team to write special code to produce the final video images used in the project.
Mr. Kessel filmed the “super emitter” sites in both visible light space as well as the far-infrared space, and then helped to build a graceful interactive article that allowed readers to toggle back and forth — between the visible, and the invisible — to help them understand what they couldn’t otherwise see.
Once the reporters acquired the visual evidence, they launched a third phase of the investigation: Ms. Tabuchi undertook research that directly tied the companies operating the leaking facilities to an industry lobbying effort that had won Trump administration support for deregulation of methane leaks like these, despite the scientifically established dangers.
When published in December 2019, the resulting project, “ It’s a Vast, Invisible Climate Menace. We Made It Visible,” made such an impact that the story itself became news that other outlets covered in depth — writing about The Times’s exposé, and going into detail about how the work had been achieved. Numerous politicians, scientists, students and public figures shared and discussed the reporting on social media including Joe Biden and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island cited the reporting on the Senate floor to demand an investigation into industry influence in deregulation.
Combining unmatched visual creativity with classic investigative rigor, The Times illuminated an unseen, poorly understood and immediate danger at the very heart of the global climate crisis.
How We Made Images of Methane, an Invisible Gas
I’ve been asked to film and photograph many things, all across the world. I have been shooting video for The Times since 2011 and manage a small team of video journalists who specialize in cinematography. But this winter was the first time I was assigned to photograph something that is invisible: methane gas. It was not easy.
Methane is a main component of natural gas and is warming our planet at an alarming rate. If everyone could see it, we might feel differently about how we regulate it.
This November, the climate investigative reporter Hiroko Tabuchi and I traveled to the Permian Basin in Texas, America’s largest oil field, with the mission of showing people what they cannot see with their own eyes.
Read about how we did it here.