Mining monitoring: 2 m weekly worldwide vs 480 m quarterly
"There's already free data for this" is the common objection to commercial mining monitoring. It's worth taking seriously — and then looking at what the free data can and cannot resolve.
Resolution is a detection threshold, not a nicety
The best free alternative is Amazon-only, quarterly, and 480 m per pixel — one pixel covers 23 hectares. At that scale a great many real sites never register; independent comparisons put site-level recall in the low single digits. Resolution here isn't image quality, it's whether a site is detected at all.
Detecting change also needs cadence. Quarterly snapshots miss short-lived and fast-moving operations and blur the timing of what they do catch. Weekly-to-monthly revisit is what makes 'new since last time' a usable signal.
Frequent, global, and typed
EarthToDate runs at 2–4 m multispectral plus 1 m visual, weekly to monthly anywhere on Earth, and classifies each detection into spectral groups — iron-rich subsoil, carbonate quarries, silicate/quartz, coal/dark, sediment ponds, acid drainage. Type-awareness is what turns detection into enforcement: distinguishing a legal quarry from artisanal gold, or flagging acid drainage as an environmental signal.
It identifies new, retired and persistent mining between any two dates — serving ministries, treasuries, environmental regulators, operators and supply-chain due-diligence with the same layer.