{"id":17186,"date":"2015-10-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-27T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/live-hakamagwp.pantheonsite.io\/news\/what-declassified-spy-images-are-teaching-us-about-climate-change"},"modified":"2017-11-09T23:41:13","modified_gmt":"2017-11-09T23:41:13","slug":"what-declassified-spy-images-are-teaching-us-about-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"custom_news","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/news\/what-declassified-spy-images-are-teaching-us-about-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"What Declassified Spy Images Are Teaching Us About Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

On May 1, 1960, Soviet surface-to-air missiles shot down an American plane after it had flown deep into Soviet airspace. While the United States initially claimed the aircraft was built for weather research, it was later revealed to be a U-2 spy plane tasked with taking reconnaissance images of suspected intercontinental ballistic missile launch pads and plutonium processing centers. The U-2 incident<\/a> would go down as one of the major pot-stirrers of the Cold War.<\/p>\n

More than 50 years later, scientists are finding new uses for these sorts of images\u2014data obtained in the interest of national security. And unlike President Eisenhower\u2019s bluff in the 1960s, this time it really is about weather patterns\u2014climate change, to be precise.<\/p>\n

\u201cRemotely sensed data, information that we get from aerial photographs or other imagery from aircraft or satellites, is absolutely crucial for environmental research,\u201d says Howard Epstein<\/a>, an ecologist at the University of Virginia.<\/p>\n

Epstein explains that as early as the 1950s, governments became interested in developing satellite platforms that could be used to gather intelligence-related imagery. And thanks to huge amounts of funding, the military was able to create high-resolution imagery about a decade before anyone in the private sector could do the same.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, all of this data was considered classified, which meant it probably occupied a crate next to the Ark of the Covenant<\/a> until the government started the declassification process in the mid-90s. And that\u2019s where things get interesting.<\/p>\n

By tapping into these old images, \u201c[w]e can effectively see what certain aspects of the Earth\u2019s surface looked like in the 1960s, and compare this with current imagery,\u201d says Epstein. These images \u201chave allowed us to quantify vegetation and sea ice changes over a 50 year period.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one study<\/a>, Gerald Frost, a PhD candidate working with Epstein, used the now-declassified images to show that trees and tall shrubs\u00a0have increased their foothold in northern Siberia by up to 26 percent since the 1960s, an increase that seems to be correlated with increasing annual precipitation.<\/p>\n

This study was the first to document an enormous ecological shift occurring across Siberia. Scientists had seen similar growth spurts among trees and shrubs in Canada<\/a>, Scandinavia<\/a>, and Alaska<\/a>, but it took the declassification of military intel for them to know what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. The recon photos helped prove that the observed changes were not isolated incidents, but instead were part of a circumpolar phenomenon\u2014one scientists suspect is closely tied to climate change.<\/p>\n

Of course, these old photos are far from the only belated gift the intelligence community has given to science. Back in 2012, the US National Reconnaissance Office donated a couple of Hubble-class telescopes<\/a> to NASA that were theoretically powerful enough to see a dime on top of the Washington Monument<\/a>\u2014from space. Just imagine what other fun toys and tech they\u2019ve got squirreled away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Using early military satellite imagery, scientists are\u00a0pushing back the timeline on scientific Earth observation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":12610,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"acf":{"hero_video_url":null,"hero_video_caption":"","deck":"Using early military satellite imagery, scientists are\u00a0pushing back the timeline on scientific Earth observation.","authors_group":[{"by_group":"by","contributors_group":[15570]}],"word_count_override":"","podbean1":"","podbean2":"","redirect":"","geolocation":null,"related":[16957,16866],"twitterimage":18948,"facebookimage":18948,"twitterdescription":"","edited":"","factchecked":"","code":"","no_old_story_flag":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/17186"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/custom_news"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/17186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20820,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/17186\/revisions\/20820"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/16866"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/16957"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}