A Fun NASA Tool Spelling Words with Satellite Imagery

Like many, I’ve been a fan of the view of Earth from orbit for a very long time. I posted many times on Dot Earth about the power of such imagery, including from Space Station Commandor Scott Kelly during his #YearInSpace #EarthArt marathon.

And of course there was Earthrise, which I recently revisited on Sustain What.

In 2016, I did wonder whether humans could become inured to such views:

Given how such imagery has become so commonplace, I found myself wondering this week whether such views of Earth have retained the ability to inspire and meaningfully engage people back on the surface with the reality that all of our triumphs and tragedies, dreams and defeats are limited to a tiny “pale blue dot,” as Carl Sagan so eloquently put things two decades ago (it was this phrase that inspired the name of this blog back in 2007).

And that’s why I was excited this morning to see the smart folks at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center launch a fun Your Name in Landsat tool that not only lets you spell your name, or other words, in Landsat imagery, but provides the location of the terrestrial feature resembling each letter.

Here are a few, starting with Gaia (which is particuarly beautiful, to my eye):

Sustain What:

Here’s Anthropocene:

The communication folks at Goddard don’t really need insights from me, but I did give an online talk in 2022 for the team there on how to press media frontiers for climate imapct.

Time lapse insights

Landsat imagery, tracked over time, also gives a distressing view of the pace of damage to planetary wonders like the Amazon River basin, which I just revisited briefly for the first time since 1990 on a Brazil trip talking to journalists, scientists and students about media innovation for impact. Here’s deforestation in a swath of the state of Pará seen through the Google Earth Engine time lapse tool since 1989, the year I first went to Amazonia to write my book The Burning Season - on land conflicts and the muder of forest defender Chico Mendes.

Going, going, not quite gone. But severely fragmented…

Play around with both the Goddard spelling tool and Earth Engine and let me know if you’ve been numbed to the spectacular nature of this planet of ours or not.

Get up close, too

I will note that it’s vital to get up close to fully understand the dynamics shaping this living planet, for better or worse. When I visited the night market in Belem last week, the site of COP 30, the climate treaty talks in 2025, I was blown away by how vibrantly the activity there reflected the intimate relationship between the peoples of the Amazon and the basin’s living resources - in this case açaí palm berries and a dizzying array of fish from both the mighty river and the sea.

More on that soon. Here’s one of my talks in Belem (Portuguese voice-over), given at the Emilio Goeldi Museum: