#satellite-imagery

#satellite-imagery

Consider the Kamchatka Peninsula, a Russian territory that reaches into the Pacific Ocean north-east of Japan, which has been battling with record amounts of snow this winter. On January 16 alone, a small city on the peninsula's southern coast, called Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, experienced a baffling five and a half feet of snow, effectively burying local residents and their cars completely. Some areas saw more than six and a half feet in just the first half of January.

Satellites show one camp spanning 500,000 square metres near the city of al-Dabba, as tens of thousands seek refuge. Several displacement camps have emerged and are quickly filling with people who fled Sudan's devastated and largely emptied city of el-Fasher, which the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized in an atrocity-ridden campaign in October. One camp has been established in the small town of Qarni, northwest of el-Fasher, according to satellite images reviewed by Al Jazeera's Sanad agency.

When you look back at 2025 from an altitude of 250 miles, you can see the scale of natural events like hurricanes and volcanic eruptions, as well as incredible detail, thanks to high-definition cameras and instruments.

The Sudanese city of El Fasher resembles a massive crime scene, with large piles of bodies heaped throughout its streets as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) work to destroy evidence of the scale of their massacre. Six weeks after the RSF seized the city, corpses have been gathered together in scores of piles to await burial in mass graves or cremated in huge pits, analysis indicates.

Though they look still on the surface, millions of optical and radar satellite images collected from 2014-2022 reveal that the rate of each glacier's flow depends on the season and geographic location. In Arctic regions of Russia and Europe, for instance, glaciers typically reach top speeds during summer or early fall, while in Alaska, they accelerate the most during spring.

Africa's official maps are stuck in the past, often either outdated, incomplete-or both. But governments don't have the budgets to fix them, making it difficult to complete projects as complex as deciding where to put new solar plants to as simple as delivering a package. Now a new plan is underway to map the entire continent using satellite data and AI.

The fall of el-Fasher has resulted in the carpet-bombing of large swaths of the city by Sudan Armed Forces, an unknown number of civilian casualties caused by both sides, and almost 15 months of IPC-5 Famine conditions in areas caused by RSF's siege of the city, the HRL report said. The HRL determined this by reviewing satellite imagery and open source and remote sensing data from Monday.

Every year, regions of the world are hit by natural disasters such as hurricanes or floods. As a result of climate change, these phenomena have not only increased in number and severity, but it has also become more difficult to predict when they might occur. Although the areas most prone to these hazards try to take proactive measures, many sources of information are not timely enough or are of limited use.

"The sick and injured were executed in cold blood," the Sudanese Coordination of Resistance Committees, a nongovernmental organization, stated two days after the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized control of the city of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, Sudan. According to the NGO, RSF fighters had either killed everyone or left them to die in the city's Al Saudi Hospital.

Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine was supposed to be a short campaign, but the larger country's swift victory anticipated by many analysts failed to materialize. Part of the reason for Ukraine's effective defense was Kyiv's early warning of the build-up of Russian forces on its border. U.S./allied intelligence warned Kyiv, but another non-government source tipped them off to the impending invasion: commercial imagery, especially Maxar's optical photos, publicly documented the build-up and the initial invasion, revealing the long convoy heading toward Kyiv on Feb. 27, 2022.

"Prior to my research, fewer than a dozen such traps were known across the entire pre-Hispanic Andes," Adrián Oyaneder, author of the research paper and an archaeologist at the University of Exeter in the UK, tells The Art Newspaper. "However, in parallel with a French research team, I was able to demonstrate that these structures are heavily concentrated in the Camarones Valley, where we documented 76 examples with strong indications of at least 100 more further to the south."

If you want the best view of Earth's landmarks, you'll need a ticket to space. Some of the world's most jaw-dropping sites - both natural and man-made - only reveal their true scale and beauty when captured from 250 miles overhead. The International Space Station has snapped images of some of these landmarks, such as the Great Barrier Reef, the Pyramids at Giza, and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Photos show how incredible landmarks look both from the ground and from way, way above.

But in Alaska, a new island has popped up in just four decades. The two-square-mile (five sq km) landmass, known as Prow Knob, was once entirely surrounded by the deep ice of the Alsek Glacier. But NASA has revealed that the small mountain has now been entirely surrounded by water, cutting it off from the mainland. An image taken by the Landsat 8 satellite in August shows that the mountain has now lost all contact with the Alsek Glacier.

"Originally, you'd have a person look at pictures. And that only scales so far," Nathaniel Manning, co-founder and CEO of LGND, explained regarding traditional data analysis.