Tag Archives: slavery and satellites

Satellites Reveal Depth of Destruction Vietnam War

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During the Vietnam War, the United States dropped more than 8 million tons of bombs and sprayed 74 million liters of Agent Orange and other herbicides in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Nearly 50 years after the war’s end, the deadly impacts of these campaigns persist: Unexploded ordnance continues to maim and kill, while hot spots of dioxin, a potent toxin in the herbicides, might still be contributing to cancers and birth defects today. Now, using declassified military satellite photos, scientists have identified the likely locations of these hidden dangers, which could help direct remediation and cleanup efforts based on research, presented on December 11, 2024 at the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union (AGU)

Identifying these risky areas in the modern landscape is challenging. Tenacious vegetation growth has long since hidden the scars of war, and historical records of bombing and herbicide spraying are both incomplete and imprecise. That’s why Philipp Barthelme, a graduate student in geoscience at the University of Edinburgh, and his colleagues turned to declassified satellite photos from the KH-9 HEXAGON and KH-4a/b CORONA missions, which were sharp enough to reveal details as small as 0.6 meters.

Although the satellite data alone cannot identify unexploded bombs, the researchers surmised they are most likely to be found in regions that were heavily bombarded. The craters from the exploded bombs stand out in the satellite images as bright white splotches. The researchers used machine learning, a kind of artificial intelligence, to pinpoint more than 500,000 such craters in Vietnam’s Quang Tri province, which was the most heavily bombed during the war, as well as a region near the borders of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

In collaboration with the nonprofit Conflict and Environment Observatory, Barthelme also used satellite data to study herbicide spraying in southern Laos. The U.S. sprayed these compounds in secretive wartime campaigns to destroy crops and improve visibility by defoliating the lush jungles. However, the dioxin in the herbicides killed and debilitated hundreds of thousands of people…The zones of defoliation from the herbicides appear in satellite data as bright, sinuous lines….

Excerpts from Maya Wei-Haas, Declassified satellite photos reveal impacts of Vietnam War, Science, Dec. 14, 2024

Satellites and Algorithms against Slaveholders

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Brick kilns, tens of thousands across South Asia are often run on forced labor.  Satellite imagery of such kilns can help tally the kilns, enabling organizations on the ground to target slaveholders at the sites…

Some 40.3 million people are held in bondage today, according to the latest estimates from the International Labor Organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. But finding them is hard… Boyd who works for the Rights Lab estimates, however, that one-third of all slavery is visible from space, whether in the scars of kilns or illegal mines or the outlines of transient fish-processing camps.

Boyd is now using artificial intelligence to speed up the search. As a pilot project, she and her colleagues at the Rights Lab used crowdsourced visual searchers to identify brick kilns. The oval shape of the large ovens, sometimes 150 meters long, and their chimneys are distinctive, even from space. “You cannot mix them up with something else,” Boyd says.

Since then, Boyd has turned to machine-learning algorithms that recognize the kilns after being trained on the human-tagged examples. Last month, in the journal Remote Sensing, she and her colleagues reported that the algorithms could correctly identify 169 of 178 kilns in Google Earth data on one area of Rajasthan, although it also output nine false positives…

Another company, called Planet, has about 150 small satellites that snap images of the globe’s entire landmass daily. The images are lower-resolution than DigitalGlobe’s, but their frequency opens up opportunities to identify changes over time.With Planet data, Boyd and the Rights Lab plan to investigate fast moving signatures of slavery. From space, you can watch a  harvest in Turkmenistan and, based on how quickly the cotton disappears, you can tell whether machines or hands picked it. In the Sundarbans, an area spanning India and Bangladesh, shrimp farms and fish-processing camps employ slave labor to clear mangrove trees—a process satellites can capture.

Excerpts from Sarah Scoles, Researchers Spy Signs of Slavery from Space, Science, Feb. 21, 2018