“Everywhere you look on Earth, you see something new.” ScienceMagArchives
East Africa has been called the cradle of humanity. But the geologically active region has also given birth to dozens of volcanoes. Few have been monitored for warnings of a potential eruption, and until recently, most were believed to be dormant. Then, Juliet Biggs decided to take a closer look—or rather, a farther look.
And the flood of InSAR data is growing fast. Since 2018, the number of civil and commercial SAR satellites in orbit has more than doubled. And at least a dozen more are set to launch this year, which would bring the total to more than 60. With the help of computing advances that make data processing easier, the satellite fleets may soon be able to detect daily or even hourly surface changes at just about every patch of ground on Earth.
Many believe InSAR will eventually underpin our daily lives. From measuring the water stored in mountain snowpacks to enabling quick responses to natural disasters, InSAR data will prove invaluable to governments and industries, says Cathleen Jones, a science team leader for NISAR, an upcoming joint SAR mission from NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation ."I want it to become so socially relevant that they can't go back to not having this data.
Glaciologists adopted the technology, too. As a young researcher at JPL in the 1990s, Ian Joughin used InSAR—which tracks both vertical and horizontal movements—to measure the speed of polar ice streams. Some scientists thought flow rates would be relatively immune to climate change. But, sadly for the world, InSAR studies by Joughin and others proved those predictions wrong.
Norway's national deformation map, based on InSAR data from Sentinel-1 satellites, showed parts of Oslo's train station sinking by more than 1 centimeter per year, perhaps because of nearby construction. Rouet-Leduc and his team now plan to monitor faults around the world using the same approach. He says it's mostly a matter of exploiting the vast quantity of data that"sits on servers without being looked at," because it's simply too much for scientists to tackle. The researchers hope they will be able to answer questions like when and why slow earthquakes happen, and whether they can trigger big, damaging events by increasing stress on other parts of a fault.
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