Cold War satellite photos shed new light on changes in landscape

COLD WAR spy satellite photographs can help tackle climate change, according to scientists.

US military intelligence photographs taken over the former Sino-soviet bloc are being reanalysed for clues about the changing landscape in Europe, in research presented at the British Ecological Society’s Festival of Ecology.

Declassified in 1995 by Bill Clinton, the then US president, the photos have been stitched together using drone image-processing software to create a Google Earth-style map.

The photos were originally taken by eight satellites that parachuted back into the atmosphere to be intercepted by US aircraft. The findings include new understanding of deforestation in Romania, with images from the Sixties showing that old-growth forests were cleared by Soviet-romanian companies.

Lead researcher Dr Catalina Munteanu, of Humboldt University in Berlin, said: “The extent and location of these were previously unknown. Many of the forests harvested then were old forest, of high ecological value, and some areas were planted with spruce monocultures that are ecologically much less resilient and diverse.”

A separate study surveyed the ecological impact of explosions during the Vietnam War, finding that agricultural land has expanded into damaged forests.

Dr Mihai Daniel Nita, of the Transylvania University of Brașov, said: “We can not only map the extent of this damage with help of these images, but also explore how landscapes have changed in response to the war. For example, some of the bomb craters are now filled with water and are used as fish ponds.” The same approach has been used to examine the decline of steppe marmots in Kazakhstan since the Sixties, with older images compared with modern ones, and burrow numbers counted.

The data could also be used to map the development of cities and other urban areas, the researchers said.