
Image: Pixabay
Since 2017, there have been media reports that China has been sending Muslims in large numbers to re-education camps in Xinjiang. These were largely based on interviews with former inmates. As international pressure began to build, China went about deleting related documents and electronic traces such as social media posts. In a country as closely guarded as China, the story would have been easily suppressed, if it were not for satellite imagery.
Two investigative stories broke simultaneously at the end of October 2018 — by the BBC and the Australian network ABC — giving not only the exact location of the camps, but also satellite images detailing their physical existence. In both cases, the investigative teams painstakingly worked with citizen rights activists and imagery analysts to pour through years-worth of images to tell the world about the horror unfolding in Xinjiang.
Let’s take the BBC investigation. The BBC sought help of GMV — a company specializing in earth observation data — to look into a list of 101 suspected facilities in Xinjiang. They measured the growth of new sites and the expansion of the existing ones, and identified and compared common features such as watchtowers and security fencing. GMV placed 44 of them in high or very high likelihood category of being prisons.

The Xinjiang Data Project presents satellite imagery evidence to show newly built detention facilities between 2019 and 2020.
Supply Chain and Manufacturing
Images from Planet show the difference in production capacity at the Volkswagen plant in Tianjin, China. Manufactured cars fill the space on the left in May 2019, while the March 2020 image is only half full, as production was stopped. The pandemic impacted manufacturing worldwide, given the globalized state of modern supply chains. One can get into visual comparison of imagery taken over different time periods to get an indication of the level of the impact expected in terms of the drop in production.

At this Volkswagen plant in Tianjin, China, manufactured cars fill up the space on the left on May 1, 2019. It is only half full in the March 3, 2020, image. Courtesy: Planet/PwC
Air and Marine Traffic
Aviation has been one of the most impacted industries due to border restrictions and stringent lockdown measures imposed at the onset of the pandemic. Marine traffic, too, took a major beating as operations at most major ports around the world came to a standstill. With both business and leisure travel impacted, satellite data showed the busiest ports and airports around the world looking like ghost towns at the height of the lockdowns. As more than 80% of global trade by volume is transported by sea, one can imagine the impact on the global supply chains.
Impact on Economy
Data from satellites can support in quantifying the impact this could have not only on the shipping industry, but also by extension on the global economy as a whole. In this satellite data analysis by MarineTraffic in April, red dots represent fully loaded oil tanker ships stranded at sea on April 22 due to the lack of global demand. With ports out of operation, ships were stranded on the high seas. And with production plants shut across the world, there were no takers for oil. On April 20, 2020, prices of US crude oil futures turned negative for the first time ever, at one point plunging roughly 300%.

The red markers are fully loaded oil tankers stranded at sea in April due to the lack of global demand for oil. Courtesy: MarineTraffic
Investigative Journalism
Other than the imagery becoming the story, often the imagery can help establish correlations to arrive at a larger conclusion. You may have some information, but you need confirmation, tying up loose ends, and clues for what, where, and when.
A Harvard research article combined satellite imagery of hospital parking lots and Baidu search queries of disease-related terms to find that the coronavirus may have been spreading in China as early as August 2019, and not December. The research is not yet peer-reviewed, and Beijing has, of course, denied the allegations.
The team analyzed commercial satellite imagery and “observed a dramatic increase in hospital traffic outside five major Wuhan health facilities beginning late summer and early fall 2019,” according to Dr. John Brownstein, the Harvard professor who led the research.

The Harvard researchers used satellite imagery of hospital parking lots and Baidu search queries of disease-related terms to investigate. Using techniques similar to those employed by intelligence agencies, they observed an upward trend in hospital traffic and search volume in the latter half of 2019. Screenshot
The researchers collected 111 satellite images of Wuhan (multiple sites per image) from January 9, 2018, to April 30, 2020, resulting in 140 successful daily extractions of parking lot volume from hospitals, and 117 from the three high-volume control sites. They observed that between 2018 and 2020, there was a general upward trend of increased hospital occupancy as measured by the parking lot volume.
Individual hospitals had days of high relative volume in both fall and winter 2019. However, between September and October 2019, five of the six hospitals showed the highest relative daily volume of the analyzed series. This coincided with the elevated levels of Baidu search queries for the terms “diarrhea” and “cough.” Both search query terms show a large increase approximately three weeks preceding the spike in confirmed COVID-19 cases in early 2020.
“While we cannot confirm if the increased volume was directly related to the new virus, our evidence supports other recent work showing that emergence happened before identification at the Huanan Seafood market,” the study says.
This article was originally published on GW Prime, a subscription-based platform from Geospatial Media. It is republished here with permission.
Anusuya Datta is a writer, editor, and commentator who focuses on the intersection of technology innovations and their applications. She is the technology and innovation editor-at-large for Geospatial Media and Communications, where she previously worked as executive editor. She is based in Canada.