Things Satellites Found In The Desert That Shouldn't Exist

A deep learning model counted 1.8 billion trees in terrain mapped as empty desert. Satellite photos taken to spy on the Soviet Union turned up 396 undocumented Roman forts. And radar from a Space Shuttle mission saw river systems the width of the Nile valley, buried beneath the Sahara. Here are 10 things found from orbit that nobody on the ground could see. A 2020 study in Nature led by Martin Brandt at the University of Copenhagen used high-resolution imagery and a trained neural network to count over 1.8 billion individual trees across more than 1.3 million square kilometres of the western Sahara and Sahel — terrain standard 30-metre satellite pixels had rendered as bare sand. Desert kites, enormous converging stone walls used to funnel herds into killing enclosures, were first noticed by RAF pilots over Jordan and have since been mapped in the thousands by the Globalkites project led by Rémy Crassard; in 2023, researchers described engraved stones from Jordan and Saudi Arabia showing kites drawn roughly to scale, around 9,000 years old and the oldest known scale plans in human history. The Steppe Geoglyphs of Turgai, Kazakhstan were spotted on Google Earth in 2007 by Dmitriy Dey, and NASA released high-resolution imagery of them in 2015. In 2023, Jesse Casana's team at Dartmouth published in Antiquity their identification of 396 previously undocumented Roman forts across Syria and Iraq using declassified CORONA and HEXAGON spy imagery, finding they run east to west rather than forming the defensive north-south wall long assumed from Antoine Poidebard's 1920s aerial survey. In November 2021, Maxar imagery revealed full-scale outlines of a US Navy aircraft carrier and destroyers built in the Taklamakan Desert near Ruoqiang, assessed as an anti-ship missile target range. Sarah Parcak at the University of Alabama at Birmingham used infrared satellite imagery to detect buried mudbrick, announcing in 2011 the identification of possible pyramids, over a thousand tombs, and thousands of settlements in Egypt. More than 1,600 mustatils — monumental stone rectangles in northwest Saudi Arabia — have been mapped from the air, and 2021 excavations by a University of Western Australia team including Hugh Thomas and Melissa Kennedy dated them to roughly 5300–5000 BC with cattle remains inside. Tutankhamun's pectoral contains Libyan Desert Glass, and in 2006 Farouk El-Baz and Eman Ghoneim of Boston University identified a possible impact structure they named Kebira using Landsat and radar topography. Satellite-traced caravan routes converging on Shisr in Oman led to the 1992 announcement of a fortress linked to the legend of Ubar, built above a limestone cavern that eventually collapsed. And in November 1981, Shuttle Imaging Radar aboard STS-2 penetrated dry sand to reveal buried river valleys beneath the Selima Sand Sheet, published in Science in 1982 by USGS geologist John McCauley and colleagues. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 — Number 10: The Forest Nobody Counted 1:25 — Number 9: The Desert Kites 2:45 — Number 8: The Steppe Geoglyphs 4:05 — Number 7: The Forts From The Spy Satellites 5:30 — Number 6: The Navy In The Desert 6:50 — Number 5: Egypt's Lost Pyramids 8:10 — Number 4: The Mustatils 9:30 — Number 3: The Crater Behind Tutankhamun's Scarab 10:55 — Number 2: Ubar 12:15 — Number 1: The Rivers Under The Sahara 13:45 — Outro ❓ QUESTIONS THIS VIDEO ANSWERS How many trees are in the Sahara? Why couldn't satellites see desert trees before? What are desert kites? What is the oldest scale plan in human history? What are the Steppe Geoglyphs? Who discovered the Kazakhstan geoglyphs? What was the CORONA satellite program? How many Roman forts were found in spy photos? Was Rome's eastern frontier a defensive wall? Why did China build warships in the desert? What is space archaeology? How does infrared find buried buildings? Who is Sarah Parcak? What are mustatils? How old are the mustatils? What is Tutankhamun's scarab made of? What is Libyan Desert Glass? What is the Kebira crater? What was Ubar? How was Ubar found? Are there rivers under the Sahara? How does radar see through sand? Was the Sahara ever green? 🔔 Subscribe for more countdown explainers like this one. 💬 Which one would you most want to see in person? 👇 #Space #Archaeology #Science