> On the satellite images analysed, the island could hardly be distinguished from the numerous icebergs drifting around in the immediate vicinity due to its ice cover.
My sort of childlike mental model of satelite imagery of the planet is that we've "covered" everything but does anyone know at what frequency we do get new satelite imagery for places like the antarctic (or, say, the dead middle of the atlantic ocean?)
I imagine that satelite imagery is a bit needs based but maybe every square meter of the earth is captured at least once a couple of months
(Not the same thing but am reminded of how despite the importance of the internet and undersea cables for fixing things, there are _very very few_ boats that can actually repair them. Maybe there aren't that many satellites pointing at some parts of the globe)
Now there's a neat trick you can pull where you go into a special 98° orbit (so like a 82° orbit, but in the other direction). At that point the slight bulge of the earth twists your orbit around just so that for any given point on earth you always pass over it at the same time of day, giving you identical shadows. That's called a sun-synchronous orbit, and is obviously immensely helpful for optical observations. But those missing 8 degrees prevent you from observing extreme latitudes. Usually we don't care because not much is happening there anyways
Even satellites without optical instruments usually suffer from the same blindspot. For example if you look at the Starlink constellation almost all satellites only reach up to about the middle of Great Britain. Everything further North is only served by a much smaller number of high inclination satellites. And there don't seem to be any Starlink satellites going directly over the poles
Probably, but likely not as thoroughly as you'd think.
The problem with most high-resolution imaging satellites is that they are not designed to work over the ocean. They can't track the Earth perfectly, so they use a lot of image processing to "unsmear" the images. These algorithms rely on tracking recognizable features moving across the frames. Which obviously fails with the ocean.
So you often get hilarious results with images of offshore drilling platforms or ships.
That being said, there are satellites specifically designed for ocean observation, so they likely won't miss something as big as a new island.
I was in the Antarctic about a decade ago, and this was underscored for me when we went to visit an island which has had maybe 20 humans visit, total - only to find it wasn’t where any of the charts said it was - it was about 3 miles away.
Fortunately we could just see it, as we had fine weather - which, upon further reading, neither of the previous surveys could, which explains the error - they had gone by dead reckoning in the era before GPS.
There is definitely cursed pirates treasure on that island
Generally somewhere around here:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/wy1PNDWcvP7h9d4j7?g_st=ic
I notice that this area isn’t fully imaged. Just around the known existing islands.
You mean the latitude and longitude.
There are many ways of calculating a position beyond one particular GNSS system.
So for measuring an island, use of swimming units seems appropriate.
tells us it's the size of two Polarsterns laid side by side.
I still don't know what that is in terms of football fields, I assume you mean United States and not Canada, but maybe someone else can help out as I've gone as far as I can.
What if this story took place on a planet where the inhabitants collectively decided to value at-all-costs economic growth over a sustainable ecosystem, resulting in a situation where they were losing over a trillion metric tons of ice per year and that is what caused the mysterious island to be revealed...?
Would be interesting if they find more info on the satellite images they are examining.