When astronauts first took pictures of the Earth from space, it was generally acknowledged to be the ‘blue planet’. Today, satellite imagery reveals a planet that is not just a mosaic of blue, or even of green or brown, but a kaleidoscope of constantly changing vivid colours. Jupiter aside, it is probably the most colourful planet in the Solar System. Plants, animals and even people create and change the colours we see from space – changes that occur from day to night, from season to season, and from one year to the next. Those colours can be a celebration of our planet’s health, of its vitality and ever-changing nature, but they can also be the first indication that something is going wrong and that we need to take action. Colour and changes in colour help us to better understand the place in which we live.
Sofie is an Inuit grandmother who lives in Ilulissat, on the west coast of Greenland. When programme director Justin Anderson and the Earth from Space film crew visited her, she was sitting sewing. There were sealskins and paintings of Arctic scenery adorning the walls behind her, but pride of place were the family photographs, including her football-playing son-in-law Peter Frederick. He plays for Nagdlunguaq-48, a club founded in 1948, and which has since won the national football championship on at least ten occasions. Sofie watches all his matches, just like proud relatives all over the world, but, in February, the temperature here can drop to minus 20°C, and the Sun barely nudges above the horizon, so Sofie had to wrap up warm; but, as she set out across the snow, she looked up and gasped. The sky was filled with a brightly coloured and constantly moving hanging curtain of light – the stunningly beautiful Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. No matter how many times she has seen it, it still takes her breath away.
‘When I was a girl, I was always afraid of the aurora,’ she mused, ‘I thought it might come close enough to touch me.’
But it was time to go.
The match was especially important for Sofie: her son-in-law Peter is captain. Despite the darkness and cold many people turned out to watch. Greenlanders are passionate about soccer. Local legend tells that its rules were learned not from the British, as history would have it, but from the aurora itself.
‘Our people have always played football. We learned it from the sky above. You call them Northern Lights, but to us they are the footballers. It was always my favourite story when I was a girl. The shapes and swirls of light are the spirits of the dead as they play football.’
Elsewhere in the Arctic, folklore and auroras go hand in hand. The Alaskan Inuit believe that the lights are the spirits of the animals they hunted: seals, whales, salmon and caribou. In Finland, auroras are sparks of fire from the flaming tail of a running fox. In the USA, Native Americans, such as the Menominee Indians of Wisconsin, believes them to be the distant fires of tribes of fearsome giants who were the spirits of great hunters, and the Vikings thought they were the glow from the armour of dead warriors making their way to Valhalla. Science, however, recognises them as something else entirely.
Auroras appear at both ends of the Earth: the Aurora borealis, meaning ‘dawn of the north’ and the Aurora australis, meaning ‘dawn of the south’, and scientists have long known why they form in the high latitudes of these polar regions. Put simply, there is a weakness here in the Earth’s magnetic field – its natural defence against dangerous particles from outer space. Think of the force field as a ring-shaped doughnut, so when charged particles from the Sun hit the Earth, they spill into the dimple at each magnetic pole, where they interact with molecules of atmospheric gases. The disturbance gives rise to great moving curtains of light, the colour dependent on the gas: oxygen gives a pale yellowish-green at an altitude of 100–300 kilometres, but bright red at 300–400 kilometres, while nitrogen produces blue or purplish-red fringes underneath.
The lights generally occur between 80 and 640 kilometres above the Earth, so from the International Space Station, orbiting at a little over 350 kilometres, scientists can now observe many auroras from above rather than from below. From space, the aurora zone can be seen as two irregular ovals above the magnetic pole at each end of the planet. Those in the north are the mirror image of auroras in the south. Space station cameras have also revealed vertical streaks of brightness. These are the places where the charged particles interact with the lines of force in the Earth’s geomagnetic field. From their unique position, the space station scientists can clearly see the high red layer above the green.
Down below, Sofie’s team won the game, with Peter Frederick scoring the winning goal. As she made her way home, Sofie paused again and looked up. She could hear the faint crackling and whistling as the green, pink and purple colours of the aurora waved gently across the sky.
Folk here believe that the lights are the spirits of the dead. The crackling is the sound of their feet as they run across the frost-hardened snow of heaven. The whistling is their voices. They are trying to talk to those still living.
‘My father taught me to whistle back to the aurora,’ Sofie said wistfully, ‘to try and bring it closer!’
The Earth from Space film crew on the ground had a less romantic first encounter with the aurora. It might be a common occurrence in Greenland, but with a limited window – just ten days – for filming, three things had to coincide: firstly, aurora activity; secondly, a clear sky; and thirdly, hope that the extreme cold did not knock out the specialist camera equipment … or the crew!
‘On the second night,’ recalls Justin, ‘it looked as if our luck was in. As we climbed the hill wearing snowshoes, and with my pocket stuffed with explosive bangers to scare away inquisitive polar bears, everything looked good. A faint streak of green was glowing overhead, and it was getting stronger as we watched it dancing on the horizon. It lit up the giant icebergs that were grounded in the frozen bay below. Camera operator John Shier began to set up our timelapse cameras, and then the wind started.
‘The skies above remained clear and the aurora was rippling away, but the wind became increasingly stronger. It picked up the snow and literally hurled it at us.
‘John struggled to operate the cameras. Intricate settings, difficult to set at the best of times, were nigh on impossible in these conditions. He was forced to wear a thin pair of gloves and, very soon, his fingers were numb. The wind in these parts seemed to have a way of piercing any gap in our clothing, and we shivered uncontrollably. The wind chill that night was minus 47°C, but we got a few of the shots we needed.’
For most of the rest of their assignment, the team was teased by the weather. The chances of catching an aurora in full glory were looking grim. On the final night the clouds rolled in. The crew was due to fly out at 05.30 the next morning, and Justin reluctantly made the call to retrieve the cameras. The shoot was effectively over, but as they made a downtrodden and disappointed trudge back up the hill, the sky suddenly cleared. With four hours to go, the team captured a spectacular light show.
‘The aurora had left it late,’ enthused a grateful director, ‘but we got the shots that we needed, albeit by the skin of our teeth.’
Some of the most mesmerising satellite images are obtained when the cameras point down at the sea. In spring and summer, especially at high latitudes, the increase in sunlight causes the phytoplankton to bloom. At sea level, these blooms are unremarkable, but from space they can be seen to create vast swirling patterns of vivid blues and greens.
The planktonic organisms responsible, such as diatoms, are sometimes known as ‘the grasses of the sea’. Their single cells contain chlorophyll, the magic chemical that, using energy from sunlight, can change carbon dioxide and water into sugars, with oxygen as a by-product. It makes them among the most important organisms on Earth. They not only help sequester the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and produce life-giving oxygen, but they are also at the base of most oceanic food chains. The phytoplankton is eaten by zooplankton, such as krill and invertebrate larvae, which is food for small fish, such as anchovies and herring, which, in turn, are prey for bigger fish, and so on up the chain to the top predators, such as sharks and whales. So, when the plankton blooms, everything else goes into overdrive.
Off the coast of Alaska, the spring and summer blooms attract herring, which are food for humpback whales. They travel all the way from Hawaii and Baja California just to be at the feast. They’re joined by the locals: immensely agile sea lions and hundreds of swooping seabirds, take advantage of the way the whales concentrate herring into tightly packed shoals. A bloom, however, can be a killer, as well as life-giver.
Dinoflagellates are tiny organisms that are also part of the phytoplankton, but, when the populations of certain types skyrocket, there can be trouble. This kind of bloom often produces a distinctive stain on the sea’s surface, a so-called ‘red tide’, although not all are red. They can be beautiful, but they are deadly. The organisms sometimes produce a poison that attacks the nervous system, making large fish, birds and mammals vulnerable. Some creatures, such as shellfish, seem immune, but, if they have filtered the poisonous plankton from the water, the neurotoxins are stored in their flesh. Any animals that eat the shellfish, including humans, may become seriously ill because their nervous system has been compromised – a condition known as paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP).
Off Alaskan shores, the butter clam filters dinoflagellates from the seawater and accumulates their toxins, retaining them in its tissues as a chemical defence. Unfortunately, it is a favoured prey of sea otters. In the past, many sea otters have died because they ate contaminated shellfish, but it seems that some families are learning about the danger. Butter clams living in the inner passages of the Alaskan coast contain toxins throughout the year, but those on the outer shores do not. The otters have learned this pattern. They now confine themselves to the outer shore where the shellfish are safer. It is even thought that mother otters take their youngsters into unsafe areas to teach them what and what not to eat – an invaluable lesson.
Their neighbours, the humpbacks feeding offshore, are not immune either. Mackerel containing neurotoxins that cause PSP in humans have been implicated in the deaths of humpback whales. At Cape Cod, on the east coast of the USA, for example, 14 humpbacks succumbed due to eating toxin-laced mackerel during a five-week period in the summer of 1987. So, a change in the colour of water can bring a bounty and succour life … or it can kill, and it’s not confined to the sea.
Satellite pictures show a clearly visible amorphous pink smudge that changes its shape like a gigantic amoeba against the bright patches of red, orange, blue, white and black of Lake Natron. Natron is a soda lake that sits in the East African Rift in northern Tanzania, and is fed by mineral-rich hot springs and freshwater from the Southern Ewaso Ng’iro River. The lake itself is shallow, little more than three metres in the deepest places, so, as the wet season gives way to the dry, its waters evaporate and the salts and minerals are concentrated to such an extent that the pH can be ten or above. The water that is left is so caustic that it can burn the eyes and skin, but salt-tolerant cyanobacteria thrive, colouring the deeper water red and the shallows orange. Otherwise, it is a difficult place to live.
Rainfall is spasmodic, the lake temperature can be up to 60°C and the air temperature can exceed 40°C. Around the lake’s edge, birds and bats, confused by its extreme reflectivity, have crashed, died and their bodies turned into grotesque salt-encrusted statues. It is a living hell, that ornithologist Leslie Brown, who almost died walking out on the soda flats, once described as ‘the foulest place on Earth’. Despite these extreme conditions, however, 2.5 million bright pink lesser flamingos choose to breed here. They come because the hostile conditions deter many of their potential predators.
At the end of the dry season in September, the moving area of pink represents the largest single population of lesser flamingos on the planet, with 75 percent of the world’s lesser flamingo chicks hatching here each breeding season. Their nests are conical-shaped mud mounds set on white, salt-encrusted ‘islands’ that form from the concentration and crystallisation by evaporation of the soda-rich waters. Before they are occupied, however, the adult birds must find a partner, and to do this, they ‘dance’.
Like the performers in a line-dancing routine, large groups of birds strut in synchrony back and forth across the lake, their necks stretched and their heads twisting first one way and then the other. The rules of the dance are not clear, but eventually many pair off and mate. If unseasonal rains do not swamp the nests, chicks appear about 28 days later, usually during the start of the wet season. Both parents feed their chick, flying to neighbouring lakes where they stock up on food, such as the microscopic blue-green alga Spirulina, which they sift from the water. When they return to the vast colony, their youngster must learn to recognise their calls, or it goes hungry.
At six days old, the fluffy grey chicks join enormous crèches, up to 2,000 strong, where, amongst other things, they learn to run, and eventually to fly. Despite the caustic moat around their nests, the chicks are not entirely safe. Eagles, vultures and marabou storks swoop in over the water to grab them, hyenas race in and brave the burning soda to snatch a bird and drag it to the lakeside, and, if that’s not enough, surviving chicks can accumulate crystalline soda anklets that gradually increase in size as the bird wades through the soda-rich water. These heavy shackles make running, walking and even the smallest movement impossible. Eventually, they die. It is a serious price to pay for the relative safety the lake otherwise provides.
Seen from space, the mottled colours of planet Earth tend to change slowly and continually. White clouds build, billow and break up, the sea washes seamlessly between shades of blue and green, but the land itself can change almost in an instant, suddenly turning into a riot of colour. The architects of such dramatic transformations are the flowering plants.
They first evolved when the dinosaurs were still around, and they have not only outlived them, but, in their own way, they have come to dominate the Earth. From space, mass flowering events create some of our planet’s most impressive colour displays.
In spring, savannahs, steppe and prairies turn from empty plains of beige to swathes of verdant green as grasses recover their vigour and freshness. In South Africa’s Namaqualand the first rains transform the landscape from arid semi-desert into a vast pageant of wildflowers, enticing fields of orange or yellow Namaqualand daisies. They bloom in such enormous numbers that they create one of the largest natural flower shows on Earth.
It is not only flowers that are the harbingers of change. In the autumn, all across New England leaves bring colour. Woodlands transform dramatically from green to reds, oranges and yellows as chemical changes in their leaves help trees prepare for winter: a colourful reminder for local wildlife to do the same.
A grizzly bear, in the northern parts of North America, is not active all year. It opts out for up to seven months, but, before entering its chosen winter den, it must eat exceptionally large quantities of high-energy food. Some bears stock up on salmon, others graze on berries, or whatever else is seasonally abundant, to pile on the pounds. They can consume an astonishing 100,000 calories a day, the equivalent of eating over 1,200 boiled eggs. Then, generally about two weeks before shuteye, the bear’s body gets ready for change. When the amount of fat reaches a critical point, the thyroid gland causes a change in hormone levels, and the bear heads for its den.
During winter, a bear’s body does not shut down too dramatically, leading some scientists to declare that it is not true hibernation. Even so, it takes a breath every 45 seconds and its heart beats less than 20 times a minute. It does not eat, drink, defecate or urinate for the entire time. It is part of an animal’s annual life cycle that accompanies the changing colours of the seasons.
People are directly responsible for extensive colour changes too. Along the shores of San Francisco Bay, ponds of brine for salt extraction are transformed into a kaleidoscope of colours. As the saltwater is moved from one pond to the next, the salinity increases and different kinds of micro-organisms thrive. They cause the water to change colour from blue-green to mustard-yellow to shades of magenta. It is so vibrant that it is not only a landmark for window seat passengers flying in to San Francisco airport, but also for astronauts on the International Space Station.
The red rocks of Utah are splashed with vivid electric blue where coloured dye is added to potash lakes. The darker colour absorbs more sunlight and heat, speeding up the evaporation process and increasing the yield of potash, a key ingredient in fertilisers. Water is pumped underground to dissolve the potash, leaving other minerals undisturbed. The brine, thick with minerals, is then siphoned into the evaporation lakes and the dye added. About 300 days later, the potash crystals are scraped from the bottom of the rubber-lined pools. It’s a way of mining potash without miners having to go underground.
The Gobi Desert is brought alive by red shapes that appear on its sandy surface. The bright crimson patches are chillies left out in the Sun to dry. China is now the world’s largest chilli farmer, with about 1.6 million hectares of land devoted to producing 31 million tonnes a year. In Massachusetts, USA, the colour red signifies cranberry crops that can be seen from space. When the berries are ripe, the boggy fields are flooded, ready for the harvest. The high water level causes millions of cranberries to float to the surface, where they can be skimmed off. It turns the whole landscape red.
In the Philippines, farmed seaweeds, known as guso, create a patchwork of dark green, blue and brown in the shallow coastal waters, while in the south of France, Provence turns purple with the colour of lavender. In the Netherlands, almost perfect parallel lines of tulip fields are like vividly coloured bar codes. About 132 square kilometres of farmland is devoted to the production of two million tulips, the largest fields of farmed flowers anywhere in the world. But one of the most spectacular sights must be the flowering of rapeseed in southern China, and the Earth from Space team were there to capture farming’s most dramatic colour transformation. With Deimos satellites positioned overhead, the images acquired in January showed a vast green landscape, but two months later it was bright yellow.
China produces about 20 percent of the world’s rapeseed oil each year, and it is used both for cooking and as bio-fuel. The farms are concentrated in the Luoping region of Yunnan. In the rugged landscape in the north of the region, the crop follows the contours of the ground, much like rice terraces, but in the south the fields stretch from one horizon to the other, the bright yellow sea of rapeseed flowers interrupted only by the brown and green ‘islands’ of rounded hills. In amongst the fields you will find Mr Dai. He is here for the bumper crop, but not for the oil.
Mr Dai and his son drive throughout Yunnan province, timing their arrival at any one place for when crops are flowering. Their battered truck is stacked with beehives, for Mr Dai is a beekeeper and the profits from the honey his bees will make will feed him and his family for another year. But as he and his son arrive, the weather is not on their side.
‘It’s cold and grey,’ he says, ‘so the bees will not fly.’
Timing their arrival is critical. There are only two weeks of full bloom before the rapeseed is sprayed with a pesticide that would kill his bees. Luckily the skies clear and the bees set to work … lots of them! One bee will only produce a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey during its lifetime, so Mr Dai has 1.5 million working for him.
Mr Dai is not the only beekeeper here. Many other nomadic bee farmers arrive from all over China, each competing to make the sweetest honey to sell for the highest price, but Mr Dai is confident.
‘My bees make beautiful sweet honey,’ he claims, ‘the best honey around!’
Colour is not necessarily the best indicator of good honey. It is the way it feels and tastes. Miss Zheng is the local honey taster, and everyone is out to impress her sweet tooth. She supplies all the big shops in China. Mr Dai offers her a spoonful of this year’s crop. She is impressed.
‘Very nice,’ she says enthusiastically, ‘yes, very nice.’
With the pesticides due to be sprayed within the next couple of days, it is time for Mr Dai and his son to pack away the hives and move on. The rapeseed is so successful here because of the bees that pollinate it, but with stricter controls being placed on crops, the balance between insect life and chemical farming has never been more delicate. The use of certain types of pesticides has had a devastating effect on bee populations worldwide. In Europe alone, one in ten wild species of bees are facing extinction. Without more positive intervention, the future for these crucial insects looks bleak.
At the bottom of the world flowers are few and far between – just two species on the Antarctic Peninsula, where the only native insect is a miniscule flightless midge, a fraction of the size of a honeybee. They all live in conditions that would kill many other creatures, so understandably it is a challenging place to do science, but biologists from the British Antarctic Survey and several other centres of excellence in the USA and Australia have a trick up their sleeve. Using high-resolution images from three satellites, they have counted the number of emperor penguins in the Antarctic from the comfort of their laboratories, and the results came as a big and very welcome surprise. They discovered that there are almost twice as many emperor penguins as previous ground-based estimates had indicated, with 26 out of 28 new colonies discovered using satellites. This means half of all the emperor penguins in the Antarctic have been found from space.
The colonies are where penguin parents first rear their chicks – not in the spring and summer like many other birds, but in the depths of winter. With midwinter temperatures of minus 60°C or even lower, the male penguins form into a compact huddle for warmth, with first an egg and then a newly hatched chick resting on their feet. The females, meanwhile, feed at sea, and are not back until the spring.
The huddle of male penguins and their offspring continually shuffles about. To stay hydrated the penguins drink melting snow beneath them, whilst avoiding the guano that builds up around their feet. As they move en masse in search of fresh snow, the penguins leave a dark trail of guano behind. This telltale stain is what the scientists had first spotted on the satellite pictures. It then led them to pick out the guano trails of individual birds, moving to and from the sea. They also discovered birds in unexpected places.
Generally, breeding colonies form on the sea ice, but with climate change affecting ice formation, the satellite pictures were revealing birds choosing more stable ice further from the sea. It is a decision that has forced the penguins to travel greater distances and to negotiate new and potentially dangerous barriers, such as ice cliffs. Climate change is shaping their behaviour, and has already seen one colony on the Antarctic Peninsula disappear.
This study was the first comprehensive census of an animal species taken from space, and it comes at just the right time. With melting ice becoming a serious concern in the Antarctic, scientists can now closely monitor the birds over time, and assess the affect of climate change on numbers.
Not far away, in the Danger Islands, at the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, scientists using Landsat images spotted the dark guano stains of another species – the Adélie penguin – and have discovered 1.5 million birds that they had no idea were there.
This archipelago lives up to its name. Its islands are notoriously difficult to get to, and its waters perilous. Even in summer, the place is surrounded by thick sea-ice, so nobody had really explored them before, but, prompted by the satellite pictures, an expedition with scientists from several US and UK universities and marine labs made the trip. As the Landsat pictures are not detailed enough, the team also used ground observations and drones in the air to help count the birds.
The results of their census were significant. They showed that these birds had escaped the warming atmosphere and sea surface temperatures that seem to be causing a population decline in the species on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Adélie penguins eat mainly krill, and these shrimp-like creatures proliferate under the ice. With less ice, there are fewer krill. Their location has also protected them from another problem that other colonies face. Ice loss allows more cruise ships to come closer to nesting colonies, spooking the birds. The Danger Islands have plenty of ice and no ships, so the birds there have sufficient krill, they are not disturbed, and the population is robust.
Despite all the modern technological advances in today’s world, there are still remote parts of the planet that scientists and explorers cannot reach easily and so we know very little about them. Satellites are changing the way we study these hard-to-get-to places, and the discoveries that have been made to date are nothing short of extraordinary.
At the other end of the world, a very different change in the colour of ice is of growing concern. Seen from space, large areas of ice and snow usually appear as brilliant white, but on the Greenland ice cap another colour has started to appear. There are ribbons of turquoise melt water crisscrossing the surface of the ice, and these rivulets flow into depressions forming huge sapphire lakes. The white wilderness is turning blue.
The water has this vivid colour because blue light is the least likely to be scattered, and the water’s purity, together with the white reflective background, makes the colour even deeper. This colour change may be attractive, but it has a downside: as the region turns blue more energy from the Sun is absorbed, heating the surface and increasing the warming effect. Looking at the satellite pictures, Justin Anderson is seduced by the colour, but troubled by the scale.
‘The imagery is just so beautiful that you have to remind yourself this is not normal, and, whilst the pictures are mesmerising, it’s actually a tragedy.’
During the course of the spring and summer, the patchwork of smaller lakes coalesces, creating fewer but larger ones. In places, the water drains away, leaving vast dimples on the ice, while some melt water streams become torrents that slice right through the ice and down to the bedrock far below. Here, it acts as a lubricant, accelerating the movement of glaciers that flow down from the central ice cap. During the past 20 years, it’s been estimated that some of Greenland’s glaciers have doubled their speed. The result? The ice cap is shrinking and 1.7 million litres of water per second drains into the sea, with an estimated 270 gigatonnes of ice being lost from the Greenland ice cap each year – that’s enough melt water to fill 110 million Olympic-size swimming pools. It is a catastrophic loss, which makes Greenland’s ice melt one of the main causes of rising sea levels. Beautiful though they are, Greenland’s blue lakes are a clear warning that something is seriously wrong on our planet.
In the tropics, white is the warning colour, not blue, and one of the key places to see the impact of this colour change is on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Under normal circumstances, this tropical coral reef and its shallow waters are a multi-coloured world of marine creatures: extravagantly coloured fish, gaudy sea slugs, neon shrimps and prawns, and of course, the varied hues of the corals themselves.
Corals get their colour from dinoflagellates, known as zooxanthellae or ‘zooks’ for short, which live in the tissues of the coral polyps. Polyps resemble miniature sea anemones, and it is the polyps of stony corals that build coral reefs, helped by their lodgers. These onboard zooks take energy from the Sun, and manufacture food from carbon dioxide and water, in a similar way to green plants and free-living phytoplankton. The coral polyps also trap food with their tentacles, but the tiny photosynthetic zooks are the main driving force behind the growth and productivity of the reef. The relationship, though, is a sensitive one.
Polyps on tropical coral reefs like warm, shallow water: 26–27°C is about right, but if the water temperature rises just a few degrees, the polyps become very sensitive to the change. The zooks living inside them start to create an excess of toxic chemicals that the corals cannot tolerate. They expel them. With the zooks gone, the coral turns white, a process known as bleaching. It can survive for a few weeks like this, but if the warming continues the coral eventually dies. This tragic loss of colour and of life has been occurring along large tracts of the Great Barrier Reef.
During 2015, 2016 and the beginning of 2017, two-thirds of the shallow water reefs bleached. During that time, the average global air temperature rocketed to such an extent that 2016 was declared the warmest year since records began. It was linked to El Niño, the warm phase of a climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean that has an impact on weather systems all over the world. In 2017, the influence of El Niño subsided, but temperatures remained high, with 2017 becoming the hottest year on record without an El Niño event.
The Earth from Space team visited Opal Reef, which was previously filmed for the Blue Planet II television series in 2015. At that time, the reef was bustling with life, but, as Justin Anderson found, just three years later it was completely bleached.
‘The damage to the reef was devastating. As we swam over patches of good reef, the contrast to the bleached reef was stark. Forests of once beautiful electric-blue-coloured staghorn corals were now an eerie jumble of spiky rubble; all the life had gone.’
The reef will be slow to recover, but there is some hope coming from the 100 or so small but healthy reefs, lying down current. Scientists have discovered they are seeding the damaged reefs with fresh coral larvae. Nature is resilient, it seems, but, as the scientists who study the Great Barrier Reef and other tropical reefs in the rest of the world insist, there is no room for complacency. Any change from the multicoloured underwater world to the colour ‘white’ could still mean the end for a tropical coral reef.
Stretching 2,300 kilometres from end to end, the Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth, and clearly visible from space, even without high-resolution cameras. Offshore, in the northern sector, are the Ribbon Reefs, and here people have been getting up close and personal with a marine creature that was only recognised by science in the 1980s – the dwarf minke whale. At no more than eight metres long, it is one of the smaller baleen whales.
They can be seen close to these outer reefs from May to October with a peak during the southern winter months of June and July. They form the only known predictable aggregation of these whales in the world. It is thought they are here to meet others of their own kind, maybe to find a mate or just to socialise, and they do not confine their interest to other whales. They are exceptionally inquisitive, approaching boats and people in the water to within a metre. Justin Anderson was out there with them.
‘It came out of nowhere, its torpedo-like shape emerging from the deep blue of the ocean. I could hardly believe it. I was with ten other snorkelers holding on to a long rope floating in the water behind our dive boat. And then I heard it, the unmistakeable sounds of a minke whale. Suddenly there were whales everywhere. It was hard to keep up with where they were coming from. Each whale seemed to have a different personality. A big one would come from behind, heading straight at you, as if looking to surprise you. A smaller whale passed directly below me, and then it turned so we could look each other in the eye. They were in no way threatening, just curious. It did make me wonder who were the tourists. This went on for hours, and it seemed there really was a connection between us. Unable to communicate in any other way, I took to waving hello with every close-up pass. I had made friends with a whale!’
Some of the whales Justin met have been coming to the Ribbon Reefs for 20 years or more, and scientists are beginning to recognise individuals, like the female whale Bento. About six years ago, Bento turned up with her calf, but where she goes for the rest of the year is still a mystery. Tracking studies indicate that the whales head south, hugging the reef as they go. They probably head for cooler waters, maybe even as far as the Antarctic, where the feeding is better. However, what is clear is that, if the colour ‘white’ should envelope the Great Barrier Reef and were the corals to ever be permanently damaged, we could also lose what is, perhaps, the ultimate wildlife encounter, where you can look a whale in the eye.
From space, one colour is spreading faster than any other. As human populations boom and cities expand, the spread of grey, the colour of concrete, is becoming ever more obvious from space.
In 1960, the only city with a million people in sub-Saharan Africa was Johannesburg. By 2015, there were 46. In China, cities have been expanding at an extraordinary rate. Today, over 50 percent of the country’s population is living in urban sprawls, compared to 27 percent in 1990. The city of Shenzhen in southeast China is a classic example. Today it is a modern metropolis on the border with Hong Kong. It has a finance centre, skyscrapers, massive shopping malls and all the trappings of modern life. In 1950, it was a simple fishing village with no more than 3,000 inhabitants, but it is growing so fast that an estimated 12 million people will live there by 2025, almost 40 percent more than are living currently in Greater London. The country where the colour grey is spreading more than anywhere else, however, is India.
In 2008, 340 million people lived in cities in India, but by 2030, that figure is expected to rise to 590 million. With more than half of the world’s economic output created in cities, there is a strong incentive for rural people to switch to a life in town. Delhi, for example, welcomes 79 new citizens every hour of every day, and India’s streets are some of the busiest in the world. With space at a premium, there is the danger that wildlife will be squeezed out, but in one city lives an individual who is trying to do something about it.
Chennai is India’s sixth largest city and it is booming, with jobs in retail, manufacturing and IT industries providing work for the 26,000 people crowded into every square kilometre. In the centre of town is the Pondy Bazaar, and negotiating its bustling streets is camera repair technician Joseph Sekar. The heavy bag of rice he is carrying is slowing him down, so he is worried he will be late getting home. He has some very special guests coming for dinner.
His visitors first started to arrive in 2004, the year of the Boxing Day tsunami. Chennai was flooded, many people drowned, and the surrounding countryside was devastated, including the forests where trees were destroyed.
‘The tsunami flooded the whole city,’ Joseph remembers, ‘but it wasn’t just bad for the people. Thousands of birds no longer had a home in the surrounding forests, and they came into the city to look for food. I noticed two parakeets, so I decided to put out some food for them. The next day there were ten more; then, it multiplied to 50, 100 and now 4,000, all of them coming back each and every day.’
The birds are Alexandrine and ring-necked parakeets. In Chennai, the birds are hungriest at the height of the monsoon, with Joseph feeding two square meals a day to the 4,000 parakeets. He even nurses injured birds back to life, so they can rejoin the flock. His entire day revolves around tending the birds: up at 5am before sunrise for their breakfast feed, and then again at 3.30 before sunset for the dinner break. And it is not just his time that he has sacrificed.
Joseph spends up to half of his earnings on feeding the birds. Does his wife mind? Apparently not. He says she loves the birds as much as he does. His whole family believe in helping others, and join in with his passion; but the years are beginning to take their toll.
‘In all these years the birds have never missed a single meal, but it’s a tough job, there’s no doubt about it. Every day I have to carry sacks of rice up from the ground floor and then buckets of soaked rice, which are even heavier. The wooden planks put out for feeding weigh 20 kilograms … but God will keep me strong.’
Rest assured, however, that Joseph will not be giving up just yet.
‘The colours are fascinating,’ he says, ‘the green, the red combinations, the ring necks – colour is the most engaging thing about these birds.’
Such is his dedication that high-resolution satellite cameras can pick out Joseph’s flock of parakeets: a pinpoint of bright green in a city of grey. It is extraordinary that one man’s efforts can make such a difference that it can be seen from space. And, despite the aches and pains, the Birdman of Chennai shows no sign of stopping anytime soon; and he has some advice for us all.
‘Love is life. Life is about giving. You should always respect living creatures, no matter what your environment is. The satisfaction in that is immense.’
While all these changes of colour are visible on the side of the world that is facing the Sun, when the darkness comes they are replaced by the colours of night. For ancient humans, the Earth was bathed in the bright glow of the Moon and the distant sparkle of the planets and stars … at least, on a clear night. When the clouds obscured the heavens it was pitch black. Then came fire. Campfires and fiery torches illuminated campsites and enabled hunters to operate at night and, if things got a bit hairy, fire deterred predators from approaching too closely. In October 1879, all that changed.
Thomas Edison switched on the lights. He invented an incandescent light bulb and the wherewithal to make it a practical lighting system. The Columbia, a cargo and passenger steamship of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, was the first to use it commercially. Now, wherever there are people there is light, and, seen from space, the lights from cities are breathtaking. They appear as white-hot centres of activity, interlinked by illuminated roads that radiate like spiders’ webs or grid-like patterns – clear evidence of our existence and distribution on Earth.
While the grey of a city by day may blend gradually with the browns and greens of the surrounding countryside, at night city lights provide sharp boundaries that indicate the densest populations of people and the places where urbanisation is having the greatest effect on Earth’s ecosystems. The patterns and colours also show neighbourhoods of different generations.
In many North American cities, older neighbourhoods have irregular street patterns with green mercury vapour lighting, while the newer cities, especially in western USA, have their streets aligned in a north-south and east-west direction and have orange sodium vapour lights. In Brazil’s São Paulo, the green lights of the wealthier old town contrast with the surrounding closely packed sodium lights of the favelas. And in Japan, the cities glow a cool blue-green where they have mercury lighting, except in Tokyo Bay, where a new development on the waterfront has a fringe of orange from sodium lamps.
However, these lights, no matter how beguiling, reflect just how much people are changing the surface of our planet. On the one hand they show how human activities interconnect the infrastructure of modern life, but they also draw the eye towards the really dark places, the last wildernesses on Earth.
At night, the oceans (along with most of Antarctica) remain the darkest places on the planet, but in 2012 the Suomi NPP satellite spotted strangely glowing lights in the South Atlantic, 300–500 kilometres off the coast of Argentina. Clusters of bright green lights were appearing hundreds of kilometres from the nearest city, forming what appeared to be a large island where no island exists. It was all very mysterious … but the authorities in Argentina had a hunch and the green colour gave it away.
The lights were on hundreds of fishing boats, many operating illegally within Argentina’s territorial waters, and they are drawn here because they are some of the richest fishing grounds in the world. The Malvinas Current, which is enriched by the upwelling of nutrients along the Argentine coast, attracts huge numbers of edible and sought-after marine creatures, such as short-fin squid.
Generally, the squid remain close to the seabed at night, at depths of around 800 metres, making them difficult to catch, but to draw them towards the surface each boat is equipped with more than one hundred high-powered green lights. Plankton and the small fish that feed on it are attracted to the brightness, so the squid rise from the depths in hot pursuit. They become snagged on fishing lines, and are hauled into the boat. The upwellings last for only three months or so, during which time about 1.8 million tonnes of squid will be pulled from these waters. It is a new trend, and it is big business. All across the globe, super-fleets equipped with bright lights are blasting the ocean’s darkness and the spread of illegal fishing has become a serious international problem. Countries like Argentina and Peru, the latter a hotspot for giant Humboldt squid, have especially productive seas within their territorial waters, so they are plagued by illegal fishing boats. There is only one answer – send in the coastguard!
Carlos Apablaza is the captain of the Argentine coastguard cutter whose job it is to intercept illegal fishing boats and shut them down. Checking out one or two incursions is one thing, but the super-fleets that Captain Apablaza encounters are something else entirely. He remembers the first time he saw the lights of an extraordinary number of fishing vessels just outside the boundary of Argentine waters.
‘For someone who hasn’t seen these fishing boats,’ he says, ‘they have to imagine that it’s like seeing a huge, brightly lit, floating city.’
With such an overwhelming flotilla of potentially illegal fishing boats on their doorstep, the authorities have had to take steps to deter them and minimise their impact on Argentine fisheries. To do this, they have embraced the latest surveillance techniques.
While the coastguard cutters are patrolling the high seas, in the sky above are the operation’s long-distance eyes. A twin-turboprop King Air Beachcraft maritime patrol flies from a remote air base in Patagonia and keeps a close eye on Argentina’s territorial waters. In the driving seat is Commander Carlos Dell Oro, but he is quick to point out that maintaining contact with such a cunning and determined fleet is not easy, even from the air.
‘Depending on the time of year, we usually find between 100 and 400 foreign fishing vessels just outside the exclusive economic zone. It’s a big challenge to remain in control of such a massive number of ships, located in such a vast area of sea.’
To confine their surveillance to a manageable area, Captain Apablaza’s coastguard cutter sets a course to patrol the outer boundary of the zone. Here, they are more likely to encounter boats that are flouting the law.
‘Our main function is to stop foreign boats from coming in to fish in Argentine waters. It’s a difficult task, but one we must carry out 365 days of the year with a lot of effort.’
Any boat fishing inside the zone must have the proper papers, but illegal boats appear to know the area well and skirt the line, remaining in international waters until the moment is right. When they think nobody is looking, they make rapid forays into the zone to steal a catch. It is a nautical game of cat and mouse, but now the authorities have a secret weapon to tip the balance in their favour.
At the Argentine navy’s satellite observation base in Buenos Aires, satellites are monitoring offshore fishing activity. Every fishing boat is equipped with an Automatic Identification Signal (AIS) transmitter that pings its position to a satellite overhead. It is a way of staying safe on the open sea. A vessel fishing illegally, however, turns off its AIS in an attempt to disappear from view, but the reality is that it has very neatly drawn attention to itself. When a fishing boat behaves in this way, the crew of the Prefecto Derbes springs into action, and sets a course to identify and intercept the illegal boat. Overhead, Commander Dell Oro and his crew scan the darkness using the latest thermal-imaging cameras to detect its heat signature.
‘The plane is able to navigate faster,’ he says, ‘so it enables us to cover a larger area than the coastguard ships on the sea’s surface. This ability to cover the largest area in the shortest possible time, and keep the coastguard updated with the fishing fleet’s location, is vital.’
And, if that doesn’t work, they simply wait. Often, fishing vessels simply turn off their lights and try to sneak across the boundary line, but, of course, if they want to fish, they must eventually turn them back on again, which gives the aircraft a chance to find them. Spotting the lights from an aircraft or a coastguard cutter in the vast darkness of the ocean, however, is not guaranteed. This is when satellites come to the rescue again.
The base at Buenos Aires analyses hundreds of square kilometres of satellite imagery and can pinpoint the tiny ‘dot’ of light of a squid fishing boat. With this capability, it is becoming increasingly more difficult for boats to go undetected. Captain Apablaza sees this as a real game-changer in protecting squid stocks.
‘Our technology has advanced, and it has helped hugely to minimise the situation with illegal fishing boats in Argentine waters, and that has made our work much easier.’
However, even though the technology may be making their patrols more efficient, it is still down to good, trusty seamanship that ensures the coastguard is in the right place at the right time. Captain Apablaza spends much of his life at sea, patrolling the wind-lashed, wave-scoured wilds of the South Atlantic. He knows his job is a vital one, but it’s still hard to be away so much from home.
‘I’m married, and I’m the father of two daughters. I carry them in my heart. And, although I’m passionate about this job, because it’s what I love to do, sometimes it’s hard to be away from the family for long periods of time while out on patrol. But you know that your family is always waiting for you when you come back home.’
