“An unprecedented scientific effort to LiDAR scan the entire surface of the Earth before it’s too late. The climate crisis threatens to destroy our entire cultural & ecological patrimony. We’ve already lost 50% of the world’s rainforests.  We’re losing 18 million acres of forest each year. Rising sea levels will make whole cities,  countries, and continents unrecognizable. Unless we have a record of these places, no one in the future will even know they existed. LiDAR, Light Detection & Ranging, involves shooting a dense grid of infrared beams from an airplane towards the ground. It’s a high-resolution scan of the earth’s surface & everything on it. Not an actual image, but a dense three-dimensional cloud of points. Earth Archive is both a program of scanning focused on endangered landscapes and an open-source collection of LiDAR scans accessible to scientists around the world. We won’t live long enough to see the full impact of the Earth Archive. Neither will you. But that’s exactly why it’s worth doing.  The Earth Archive is a bet on the future of humankind. A bet that together, collectively, as people & as scientists, that we will face the climate crisis. And that we’ll choose to do right thing. Not just for us today, but to honor those who came before us, and to pay it forward to future generations who will carry on our legacy…”

See also – These Maps Reveal Earth’s Unspoiled Places – A revolution in archaeology is happening just when we need it most.