Lignite mines in North Rhine-Westphalia

Sentinel-2 MSI acquired on 15 October 2017 at 10:40:09 UTC
Sentinel-1 CSAR IW acquired on 15 November 2017 at 05:49:40 UTC
Author(s): Sentinel Vision team, VisioTerra, France - svp@visioterra.fr
Keyword(s): Land, climate change, fossile energy, open pit mine, Germany
Fig. 1 - S1 (15.11.2017) - vv,vh,ndi(vh,vv) colour composite - South-west of North Rhine-Westphalia between Düsseldorf, Cologne & Aachen.
2D view
Germany is the World's 1st producer of lignite (brown coal), it reached its peak production in 2012 after it decided to phase-out nuclear power.
Fig. 2 - S2 (15.10.2017) - 11,8,2 colour composite - 3 giant open-pit lignite mines (red) & their power plants (magenta).
2D view 2D view
Fig. 3 - S1 - vv,vh,ndi(vh,vv) colour composite - The 66km² Tagebau Garzweiler mine should have a 48km² extension.
2D view 2D view
Fig. 4 - S2 - 4,3,2 natural colour - The 45km² Hambach mine reaches -299m below sea (its 220m-long excavators are circled).
2D view 2D view
The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Space Agency or the European Union.
Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025, processed by VisioTerra.
More on European Commission space:
More on ESA: S-1 website S-2 website S-3 website
More on Copernicus program: Scihub portal Cophub portal Inthub portal Colhub portal
More on VisioTerra: Sentinel Vision Portal Envisat+ERS portal Swarm+GOCE portal CryoSat portal