Review: Earth at Night

Earth at Night by NASA
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating ebook from NASA: educational while easy to follow and with stunning satellite imagery of Earth. It is hard not to think there is implicit commentary in these images, say for the burgeoning Flat Earthers:

A thin yellow-brown band tracing Earth’s curvature at image top is airglow.

And much on the environmental/climate change front that is very subtly stated:

Scientists watched the Arctic with particular interest in the summer of 2012 when the areal
extent of Arctic sea ice set a new record low. The behavior of sea ice following such a low extent
also interests scientists...

I, of course, have heard of melting polar ice, but the Arctic polluting effects of Dakotan drilling was new to me:

Connection Between Gas Flaring and Arctic Pollution—North Dakota

Previous research has suggested that gas flares from oil and natural gas extraction in the Northern Hemisphere could be a key source of black carbon pollution in the Arctic. But since international inventories of industrial emissions have gaps in observations and reporting, they often over- or underestimate the amount of pollutants. Gas flares are an often-overlooked subset in that incomplete dataset. Data from the VIIRS DNB on the Suomi NPP satellite were used to examine gas flare signals from nightlights and the nitrogen dioxide retrievals for four regions around the planet; only the Bakken Formation in North Dakota is shown here. Levels of atmospheric nitrogen dioxide were found to rise about 1.5 percent per year at Bakken. This means the concentration of black carbon produced by those flares was also likely on the rise. Such local or regional nightlight data as are described here clearly show the potential for global consequences.

We can recall the tragedy of mishandled disasters and see its vivid evidence:

Lights Out—Puerto Rico

Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico with devastating force in September 2017. Flooding, downed trees, and toppled power lines made many roads impassable. Most of the electricity grid and telecommunications network were knocked offline, leaving 1.5 million people without power. For many locations power wasn’t restored for weeks and even for up to 11 months in some locations. The long power outages, in part, led to the historic property, economic, and life losses in the storm’s aftermath. While 64 people died from direct storm impacts (i.e., via structural collapse, flying debris, floods, and drownings), an estimated 700 to 8400 excess deaths were associated with long-duration disruptions to essential services.

..and the effect of war:

Conflict in the Middle East—Syria

Six years of war in Syria have had a devastating effect on millions of its people. One of the most catastrophic impacts has been on the country’s electricity network. The left and middle images (below) were created using two separate nightlight datasets from the VIIRS DNB on the Suomi NPP satellite for 2012 and 2016...

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