Issue 100: Top Ten Images
In this week’s issue:
- Celebrating our 100th issue with 10 of our favorite images
- Satellites monitor the changing seasons
- Massive ash eruption at Siberia’s eastern end
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Feature Story: Special 100th Issue
Snapshots turns 100 this week, making us a centenarian in newsletter years and the average age of a US senator. Just kidding (kind of). But like a senator we couldn’t have gotten here without your support, so thank you to everyone who’s joined us for this journey and helped spread the word. To celebrate this milestone we’re looking back at ten of our all-time favorite images pictured, processed, and produced by Planet satellites. Earth makes it pretty easy to capture striking scenes, but we find that a little orbital perspective helps round out the image.
Earlier this year we pointed one of our small Doves at the planet’s highest mountain range, the Himalayas. It’s not often one gets to look down at some of the world’s tallest peaks, but that’s just one of many perks of working in outer space.
What do lightning strikes, mountain ranges, and Romanesco broccoli have in common? Besides a flair for the dramatic, they all demonstrate fractal properties. These self-similar geometric figures are infinitely complex and are found everywhere, up-the-ladder from tiny neurons to coastal rivulets to galaxies.
Our satellites can’t see into the depths of the ocean, but they can see the ships on its surface that are exploring the deep. In 2022, the ice-breaking vessel S.A. Agulhas II set out on the Endurance22 expedition in Antarctica to find the legendary Endurance shipwreck from a century before. This time the expedition ditched the sextants and chronometers and opted for state-of-the-art tech to find the ruin. Here’s the ship carving a path through the unforgiving Weddell Sea ice.
Stand atop the world’s tallest mountains — or sit and look at satellite pictures — and observe two sides: one verdant and the other barren. If your view is obscured by clouds, that’s kind of the point. This phenomenon is called a rain shadow, and it happens when one side of a mountain range receives all the rainy weather and the other doesn’t. The largest, and perhaps most pronounced, is the difference between the fertile lands south of the Himalayas and the dry Tibetan Plateau to its north.
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano made itself known last year when it erupted so violently it sent literal waves across the world. Its plume clocked in at 58 km (36 mi) high and it displaced enough water to temporarily influence Earth’s global temperature. We captured this image during the volcano’s 4-week eruption but just a week before its astounding climax.
We definitely suffer from recency bias, but we’re quite smitten with the visuals from our Forest Carbon Diligence product. We’ll be venturing further into these woods later, but for now just imagine a global dataset of aboveground forest carbon, tree height, and canopy cover. Pretty cool right? Wrong. It’s outright incredible.
Contrast makes for compelling images whether on the ground or from orbit. So when ample rainfall transforms the normally barren Australian Outback and creates rivers of green against a backdrop of orange, you get something both out of this world and right in a sci-fi show.
Fault lines are the edges of Earth’s puzzle-piece picture — the place where tectonic plates collide, subside, and slide on a timeline so prolonged it puts the word “glacial” to shame. There are a few different types of faults, but the most easily visualized is the strike-slip (aka transform), described by two blocks moving horizontally past one another. And perhaps no place demonstrates the motion better than China’s Piqiang Fault.
Jagged alpine cliffs captured at an oblique angle? Yeah, that’s making the list 100% of the time. This off-nadir SkySat capture of Patagonia’s Fitz Roy mountain has graced the bucket lists of climbers and the backgrounds of computer desktops alike.
During dark times we turn to sights that bring a bit of brightness to our world. And an act of creation that highlights the dark waters of British Columbia seems as good an image as any to end our 100th issue. Each spring, tens of thousands of herrings gather near coastlines to reproduce, turning the waters a cloudy white with their milt and eggs in an act called a herring spawn. Herrings are a cornerstone of the region’s marine food chain, so the annual event attracts a number of predators (as well as curious scientists and our satellites).
Remote Sensations: Alaskan Autumn
Gaining one hour of sleep but losing a reasonable sunset hour doesn’t feel like a great trade to us. So we’re trying hard to look at the figurative bright side (fall colors) and literal bright side (snow-covered landscapes).
But watching the seasons change in satellite images isn’t just an aesthetic endeavor. Scientists are using the data to study how climate change is delaying seasons’ arrival. After comparing decades of remote sensing data to centuries of historical information, the researchers found that spring arrives on average 15 days earlier and autumn 15 days later. That could be troublesome news for all the organisms dependent on stable seasonal patterns.
What in the World: Ash Column
Volcanic activity at the ends of the Earth usually guarantees an interesting sight. So we pay attention when Eurasia’s tallest active volcano erupts. Klyuchevskaya Sopka began erupting weeks ago, sending ash columns miles above the far eastern Siberian peninsula.
And while we have your volcanic attention, here’s a pretty amazing capture of Indonesia’s Krakatau volcano from the archives.
All imagery Ⓒ 2023 Planet Labs PBC
Editor: Ryder Kimball | Images: Ryder Kimball, Max Borrmann, Julian Peschel, and Maarten Lambrechts
