Not All Change is Good
It’s always hard to see; when I read news of difficult events — like an earthquake or flood — and find satellite images from my company that show the crisis. It’s intense to see the change between images that depict the severity of the event: in one image there is a patchwork of farms, in the second image the farms have disappeared, covered with muddy flood water. It’s hard seeing change that I know was painful and difficult for the people experiencing the event.
This was recently the case when I read about the mandatory relocation of refugees from a camp near the small Greek village of Idomeni, which borders the Republic of Macedonia. Planet’s imagery on December 18, 2015 shows the city and surrounding farmland. On April 28th, an encampment is clearly visible along railroad tracks south of the river. Just over a month later on June 9th, the individual white tents are gone, the ground freshly resurfaced.
In satellite imagery this change is shown in color differences of a few thousand pixels. For the people being forced to leave, the change is a physical experience, one that I can only imagine is scary and disorientating.
At Planet we collectively look at hundreds of images a day — just a fraction of the hundreds of thousands that we collect — and it’s easy to become numb to the fact that in nearly every image there are people living their lives. But, because we’re often looking at imagery that was captured only hours before, we’re quickly reminded that what we’re seeing is often unfolding on the ground in real time. This concept of time and a mentality of “where was I at this moment” changes the way you look at an image. And when you’re able to look at a series of images of the same location taken hours or days apart, you realize that while everything in one image appears still, it is different in the next image, and in fact is always changing.
For decades satellite images of Earth have appeared static. Leaving little indication that everything in the picture is in some state of motion. Seeing two images of the same refugee camp, one with sprawling tents everywhere and the other showing what looks like an empty dirt parking lot, removes the static nature of the imagery. It becomes no longer a picture of a place, but a point in time in an ongoing evolution.
Shifting our perception of Earth from one that is static to one that is always changing requires new visualizations of our planet. Rapid imaging of our planet enables us to see how our cities, surroundings, environments, virtually everything, change and evolve every single day. Monitoring and measuring this constant change can help us make smarter decisions about the way we expand our cities, protect our forests, and respond to disasters.
I look at images of Earth very differently now. I always wonder what is happening in the image, what people are experiencing, and often look for another image of the same location from a different time to see what’s changed. Sometimes the change is the harvesting of a field, the development of a skyscraper, or the building of a new road. And, sometimes, it is the clearing of a refugee camp.
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