A Changing Earth at Night (Regions)

NASA’s Black Marble products are also being used by scientists and decision-makers to monitor gradual changes driven by urbanization, out-migration, economic changes, and electrification. These images show the rapid electrification of India’s rural settlements in recent years. Huge swaths of northern India, relatively dark in 2012 night shots, are lit up in NASA’s Black Marble imagery from 2016.

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. These images clearly show how the lights have gone out during the course of the conflict, leaving people to survive with little to no power. Syria was once one of the eastern Mediterranean’s major power suppliers. It has 15 power stations, including three major hydroelectric dams.

Gas flaring is a globally-used method to dispose flammable, toxic, or corrosive vapors to less-reactive compounds at oil production sites and refineries. This practice leads to significant increases of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Gas flaring is also responsible for particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, methane, and carcinogenic substances such as benzene and toluene. Light from gas flaring activity in Nigeria decreased from 2012 to 2016, largely due to international agreements acted on by the country.

City lights at night are a fairly reliable indicator of where people live; however, this isn’t always the case, and the Korean Peninsula shows why. As of July 2012, South Korea’s population was estimated at roughly 49 million people, and North Korea’s population was estimated at about half that number. But where South Korea is gleaming with city lights, North Korea has hardly any lights at all—just a faint glimmer around Pyongyang. Daily nighttime images are also being used to help monitor unregulated or unreported fishing. The 2012 image shows the lights of fishing boats south of the Korean Peninsula. These fishing boats disappeared in 2016.