[LINK] ""Lost" Satellite Photos Reveal Surprising Views of Earth in the 1960s"

[rfmcdonald]

National Geographic's James Thompson reports on two data scientists in the United States who have recovered some of the oldest satellite images of the Earth ever taken. This, among other things, gives scientists a baseline on changes in everything from sea ice cover to the shape of storms.

Scientists have uncovered a cache of satellite images of Earth from the 1960s that had been forgotten in storage for nearly 50 years and that push back the first satellite images of our planet a full 17 years.

The trove includes the first publicly available satellite photos of Europe, the earliest aerial views of Antarctica's ice, and a record of Central Asia's Aral Sea before it dried up. There's also a rare photo of the most powerful storm to hit North America in modern times.

[. . .]

Earth scientists David Gallaher and Garrett Campbell liberated the data from a National Climatic Data Center archive in North Carolina, uncovering 25 boxes of magnetic tapes and photographic film from three Nimbus weather satellites launched in the 1960s and 1970s.

Gallaher had heard about the data at a conference and called the National Climatic Data Center to request access to some pictures of Greenland. "We have no way of figuring out what's Greenland," came the reply.

That's because the data had never been sorted or digitized. So Gallaher and Campbell took on the painstaking process of digitizing hundreds of thousands of photos and making them publicly available.