Any time you can find a different way to look at the world, you learn something you couldn't imagine before. In general, failure of imagination is our biggest hindrance to progress, whether it is legitimate or willful ignorance. Satellites tell us about melting ice and rising seas, and also about the evolution of cities, which are continuing to grow rapidly all around the world.
The big picture
Karen Seto, the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, studies urbanization and its impact on the environment, including climate change. She uses satellite images to study and demonstrate urban growth, especially in rapidly developing places such as China and India. She led the chapter on how cities can mitigate climate change for the fifth climate report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2015, and she is leading the same chapter on the sixth report. She is the coauthor, with research associate Meredith Reba ’14MESc, of City Unseen: New Visions of an Urban Planet, a book of satellite images published in 2018 by Yale University Press.