Image above: PlanetScope image of ice-dam study site in Jokulsarlon, Iceland taken March 2, 2023. © 2023, Planet Labs PBC. All Rights Reserved. In icy environments, mountain lakes can be dammed not by just rock, but by long standing ice formations. But with the ongoing retreat of glaciers and icecaps around the […]

Image above: Planet image of ice sheet carvings set into the mountains of British Columbia, Canada taken July 30, 2020. © 2020, Planet Labs PBC. All Rights Reserved. About 20,000 years ago, the world was experiencing the Last Glacial Maximum, the end of the Pleistocene epoch when ice sheets covered most of […]

Above: Near-infrared PlanetScope image taken June 12, 2019 of research study site over the Siberian Braided River. © 2019, Planet Labs PBC. All Rights Reserved. In high latitudes, seasonal temperature changes cause dramatic variations in water and ice presence in terrestrial areas like lakes and river systems. This water and ice is […]

Arctic permafrost is the frozen ground in and around the arctic circle which holds mass amounts of soil organic carbon. But due to warming global temperatures, Arctic permafrost is beginning to unfreeze and degrade, releasing stored greenhouse gas emissions including carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Within this landscape, thawing land, […]

If it were possible, a stationary observer in sun synchronous orbit would see one Planet Dove satellite rocket past every ~90 seconds. At polar latitudes, the relative speed of Earth’s rotation is much lower, like the inside tracks of a vinyl record. As a result, Planet often collects multiple images of the […]

In the Arctic and Boreal regions, millions of freshwater lakes influence carbon dioxide and methane emissions to the atmosphere. Lakes that are more dynamic, with a variable shoreline, may have a greater flux of these greenhouse gases. Leveraging the Planet Dove and RapidEye constellations, which collectively image daily and sometimes multiple times […]

Many communities live in mountainous or glaciated terrain, with a constant threat of landslides and avalanches. Remote sensing methods, including construction of digital elevation models (DEMs), have the potential to detect deformation of the Earth’s surface—not only horizontally, but also vertically. While active sensors like radar are excellent for detecting this 3D […]

In 2016, two glaciers in Tibet sheered down to their bed, erupting into avalanches. The first disaster killed nine people. A major study, published in Nature Geosciences, examined Planet imagery in the months leading up to the avalanches, and their aftermath. The work was subsequently featured in the The New York Times: “‘…it […]

Using the Yukon Flats in Alaska as the test study area, Sarah Cooley and colleagues evaluated the potential scientific utility of the Planet Dove constellation for hydrologic modeling and research. The study concluded that Planet imagery can improve mapping and tracking changing inundation extent of hundreds of small, heterogeneous water bodies in […]

Jakob Steiner and team use digital elevation models and Landsat imagery in combination with high resolution Planet data to quantify surface elevation changes and flow velocities during a glacial surge of the Khurdopin Glacier. They conclude that the high frequency of Planet imagery is useful to capture peak surge velocities that are […]