The New York Times – Imagery from the Cold War’s Corona satellites is helping scientists fill in how we have changed our planet in the past half century. “To map a landscape’s history, foresters like Dr. Nita long depended on maps and traditional tree inventories that could be riddled with inaccuracies. But now they have a bird’s-eye view that is the product of a 20th century American spy program: the Corona project, which launched classified satellites in the 1960s and ’70s to peer down at the secrets of the Soviet military. In the process, these orbiting observers gathered approximately 850,000 images that were kept classified until the mid-1990s. Modern ecologists chronicling precious or lost habitats have given second life to the Corona images [he Corona project, which launched classified satellites in the 1960s and ’70s to peer down at the secrets of the Soviet military…] Paired with modern computing, the space-based snapshots have helped archaeologists identify ancient sites, demonstrated how craters left by American bombs during the Vietnam War became fish ponds and recounted World War II’s reshaping of Eastern Europe’s tree cover. Even though they’re static, the panoramic photos contain discernible imprints — penguin colonies in Antarctica, termite mounds in Africa and cattle grazing trails in Central Asia — that reveal the dynamic lives of earthly inhabitants below. “It’s Google Earth in black and white,” said Catalina Munteanu, a biogeographer at Humboldt University of Berlin who has used Corona images to show that marmots returned to the same burrows throughout decades of destructive agricultural practices in Kazakhstan…”