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October 27, 2022 | ISSUE 49 |
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PlanetScope • Lake Natron, Tanzania/Kenya • October 22, 2022 |
In this week’s issue: We visit places with frightening backgrounds for Halloween; a glacier bleeds iron-rich sediment in Norway; a futuristic linear city breaks ground in Saudi Arabia; and the Landsat program turns 50. |
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FEATURED STORYSpooky Scenes
Our planet is a welcoming sight amid the infinite cosmic darkness surrounding it. Images of Earth from space show a vibrant and colorful sphere teeming with life. But get closer and you’ll see places that have inspired ghastly legends, nail-biting superstition, and outright terror. In space no one can hear you scream, but you can still get spooked.
We’re celebrating Halloween this year with some spooky scenes from across the world. So without further ado, let’s kick off the frightful festivities with this beautiful Irish pasture. Well, it’s also the site of the ancient settlement of Rathcroghan, the entrance to hell, and the birthplace of Halloween. For thousands of years the local Iron Age Irish celebrated the broken barrier between spirit and physical realms during Samhain on this verdant land. But over the years the festival evolved to become the costumed and candy-filled fright-fest we know today.
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PlanetScope • Tulsk, Ireland • August 13, 2022 |
Like a love triangle, the Bermuda Triangle is a 3-pointed realm with boundaries a bit too ill-defined for anyone’s comfort. Ships and planes have reportedly disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the triangular area roughly between Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico. The explanations range from extraterrestrial abduction to geomagnetic anomalies. But there’s no hard evidence of any peculiar intervention (and our Doves orbit over the triangle just fine), so take these superstitious reports with a grain of salt. |
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PlanetScope • Bermuda • April 15, 2022 |
Here’s Stanley (said with our face poking through an axe-hole). The Coloradan Stanley Hotel comes complete with 140 rooms, long carpeted corridors, a hedge maze, and a brigade of alleged ghosts. After an overnight stay in the 70s, Stephen King based The Shining’s Overlook Hotel on the Stanley, making it iconic in both spirit-seeker and horror fandom. Check in any time, check-out never. |
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SkySat • Stanley Hotel, Colorado, USA • April 1, 2022 |
If the dead ever rise like they do in zombie flicks, the last place you’d want to be is in Colma, California. This necropolis just south of San Francisco is home to 1,500 people who live aboveground and 1.5 million resting 6 feet below. Colma was built in the early 1900s to accommodate the growing number of the area’s dead and overfilled cemeteries. Jeepers indeed. |
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PlanetScope • Colma, California, USA • September 29, 2022 |
On the border of Tanzania and Kenya is a ghastly lake known for turning birds seemingly into stone. Lake Natron is a shallow salt lake that loses water through evaporation, leaving behind salts and natron—a sodium mixture which gives the hot (100° F+) water its basic (10+ pH) composition. If the blood red algae filled water isn’t spooky enough for you, then consider that when migrating birds accidentally crash into its chemical-rich waters they die and leave behind ghoulish, Medusa-like, calcified skeletons. |
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PlanetScope • Lake Natron, Tanzania/Kenya • October 13, 2022 |
Dracula is an iconic Halloween character better known for his blood sucking than his castle lurking. But lurk in castles he does. Transylvania's Bran Castle has been deemed the closest fit to the vampire’s abode, though it wasn’t the direct inspiration for Bram Stoker’s novel. The castle perches between two steep hills amid Romania’s dark forests and can be seen near the center of the image to the right of the road.
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SkySat • Bran Castle, Transylvania, Romania • October 24, 2019 |
And lastly, the scariest sight for remote sensing enthusiasts: clouds and bad data within a single frame. Terrifying. |
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PlanetScope • Bad data of Turks and Caicos • September 24, 2022 |
Bonus: Our Doves can’t knock on your door but they still like trick-or-treating. So this year they’re dressing up in a costume that’ll keep them warm in the icy temperatures of outer space: a toaster. |
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Change of the weekBleeding Glacier
Saudi Arabia has declared war on the age-old sprawling city design in its newest megaproject. The Line, as it’s called, will be a 170 km (106 mi) long, 200 m (656 foot) wide city with mirrored walls built for 9 million people. It’s part of the Neom project, a huge revamp costing a cool $500 billion. If you haven’t seen the ads, the articles, or the commentary on the project, strap in for your daily dose of dystopia. |
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SkySat • Neom, Tabuk, Saudi Arabia • October 23, 2022 |
It sounds like something out of science fiction, but groundwork has already begun with some ambitious terraforming. Take a look as a section of The Line is excavated from the desert over the past year. |
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PlanetScope • Neom, Tabuk, Saudi Arabia • May 31, 2021 - November 29, 2921 - October 18, 2022 |
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Landsat Turns 50
We ended last week’s feature story discussing how the deeper the visual archive the more visible the change. Ours is over a decade old, but Landsat’s archive recently turned 50. Since 1972, the Landsat program has launched a series of satellites that have provided us with up-to-date images of Earth and, by extension, invaluable references for how it has changed since. Read more here about the program and see some of its most striking images.
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Data from USGS/NASA, processing by Planet • Smoke from burning oil wells in Kuwait • July 1, 1991 |
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Weekly Revisit
Last week our RapidEye and PlanetScope constellations teamed up to create some timelapses that reveal just how much can change in a decade. Read it here and check out the whole archive for more stories.
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RapidEye / PlanetScope • Wadi As-Sirhan Basin, Saudi Arabia • April 2012 - November 2022 |
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