Super high-resolution spy satellites have been imaging sea ice at the poles for the last decade on behalf of earth scientists. But the images has been kept from the public and nearly all scientists, too. Over the last 10 years, a tiny group of scientists with security clearance was able to see some of the images, but couldn’t use them publicly. Now, mere hours after a National Academy of Sciences committee recommended that the intelligence community “should release and disseminate all Arctic sea ice” imagery that can be created from the classified satellite data, the United States Geological Service has published the set of high-res images. The new data provides what NAS committee member Thorsten Markus called “a dramatic improvement” in what we can see. The previously off-limits sea ice data has a resolution of one meter. The previous scientific standard sea ice images from the Landsat program have a resolution of 15 meters. Markus saw some of the sea ice images last December when the
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