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Mission Impossible: Secret Environmental Monitoring
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
How many of you love the environment (or at least some part of nature)? Now, how many of you have an interest in spies, James Bond, the CIA and so forth? If you have an interest in both nature and secret agents, you may also be interested in the fact that the two are being combined. Yes, that’s right: scientists are collaborating with spies to gain better understanding of the Earth and climate change.
How, exactly, will this scheme work? Well, they intend to employ the use of spy satellites and other devices to assess the hidden pieces of climate and environmental change. With a strong backing from the director of the CIA, work thus far has included the study of images of Arctic sea ice—images that were captured from reconnaissance satellites—in an effort to separate natural summer melts from the effects of man-made climate change.
It’s almost like something out of The Avengers television series (or film), with the combining of secret agents, weather patterns and all. This particular environmental monitoring program has little to no impact on the normal “intelligence gathering” they do, but it does release secret information already collected and will also record environmental data when classified sensors are idle or passing over the wild places of the world.
By Heidi Marshall
Tags: CIA, Climate change, environmental monitoring, reconnaissance satellites, secret agents, spies
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