Remote Sensing in the News: Gaza Aid Massacre

     In this New York Times article from February 29, 2024, aerial photography is used to piece together the events that led up to the massacre of hundreds of civilians attempting to receive aid. The article references multiple examples of remotely sensed data. First, it references the drone footage published by the Israeli army. They note that this footage was spliced together and is missing key moments. Some of this footage is included in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Drone Footage from IDF

    Additionally, this article references social media videos and a video from Al Jazeera. This aims to fill in the gaps left from the IDF footage that cuts out certain sections. They combine this information with an aerial photo of the Gaza Strip to visualize the unfolded events. This is shown in Figure 2. 

Figure 2: Combing satellite data with other footage to visualize the tragic massacre of over 100 starving civilians attempting to receive aid. 

    The use of remotely sensed data and aerial photography is useful in this sense as it provides a full picture of the massacre rather than the parts the IDF wanted to be released. 

Link to article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/29/world/middleeast/gaza-aid-trucks-map.html 

Rising Sea Levels on the Beaches of Wildwood, New Jersey

 In late January, one of the beaches close to my childhood home had a massive erosion event from increased sea levels and storms. All throughout my life, my family always avoided Wildwood beach because it took so long to walk to a water from the boardwalk, about a quarter mile. However, less then 10 years later, the water is only a few hundred feet away from the boardwalk. Because the beach is so long, no sand dunes were put in place to help protect against the rising ocean, which has no become a pressing issue. While there was a plan to start creating more dunes in 2017, the project never started, and a retaining wall, or bulkhead, had started to be built instead, but even that was scrapped. Because of the most recent storms and rising sea levels, a new bulkhead project was proposed, but it would only start in 2025 or later, leaving the beach's residents and businesses at the mercy of mother nature. In an article written about the beach and potential upcoming project, the writers include a single image of Wildwood beach, combined from an image from 1995 and another from late 2023. The two images are from one area, and have been scaled and matched evenly side by side so that the 1995 image shows the left most part of the area and the 2023 image shows the right part of the area. This allows us to be able to see the true extent of the sea level rise from where the two images meet, rather than using two images from the same exact area with the same nadir. From these images, it's easy to see how much of a threat there is to multiple buildings at the end of 2023, which will only continue to get worse.

https://wildwoodvideoarchive.com/are-north-wildwoods-beaches-gone-forever/