Earth Observation · Interactive
Ground Truth
Forty years of Earth, watched without blinking — and measured.
Since the 1980s, satellites have imaged the whole planet on a loop. That unbroken record lets you compress four decades of change into a few seconds — and pull the economic signal straight out of the pixels. Six places, six kinds of change. Scroll.
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The Planet difference
At three metres
Illegal gold mining in Madre de Dios, Peru — rainforest stripped to bare earth and pocked with mercury ponds. The same place at Landsat's 30 m and Planet's 3 m. Drag to compare.
What it's worthGold prices drive the digging; at 3 m, daily, the spread shows up the week it happens — a physical-economy signal that doesn't wait for a quarterly report.
Planet imagery © 2023 Planet Labs PBC (PlanetScope Sandbox Data), processed by D. Balanzat and used under CC BY-NC 4.0, rendered via the Planet Insights Platform. Landsat 30 m: USGS/NASA (public domain) via the Microsoft Planetary Computer.
Six places. Millions more.
Every story here runs on free, open satellite imagery — four decades of Landsat — the public record that reaches back to the 1980s. What it can't do is reach back at high resolution, or update faster than about once a week.
That's the line where Planet begins: the largest daily Earth-observation archive ever built, at 3 metres. The history here is open data; the present, at this fidelity, is Planet's.
The operational companion: The Power Draw →