Just mere hours after the National Academy of Sciences recommended that more than a thousand intelligence images of Arctic ice be released for general viewing, the Interior Department made those pictures available. The Academy made the recommendation that the images be released in order to help scientists and researchers further study and understand the impact of climate change on the Arctic at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) Wednesday and by that afternoon the images were available for viewing.

There are approximately 700 images that show sections of sea ice from six different locations in the Arctic Ocean. A further 500 pictures are from 22 other sites across the United States. The images of the Arctic have a resolution of approximately 1 meter, which is a huge improvement over previous pictures of the Arctic Ocean that were available, according to NASA’s Godder Space Flight Station’s Thorsten Markus. Markus is pleased that the pictures were released, but was also a bit shocked, saying it was “a huge surprise — I expected after the report, months could go by until somebody moved.”
Until these pictures, the best resolution for images of the Arctic ice was 15 to 30 meters. The new images make it easier to spot smaller changes that might have been missed at a larger resolution, such as the pools of water that form on top of ice floes.

Knowing about these pools of melting water will help to develop models of what could happen in the Arctic in the future and without the 1 meter resolution of these latest pictures, they might have been missed.

“The (forecasting) models do well at capturing the overall sea ice cover in the Arctic. But there are certain processes that we cannot adequately model yet, mainly … because we don’t have enough data,” Markus said.

The public images were made from classified image as part of the Medea program, which allows scientists to request spy pictures that were taken of environmentally sensitive locations worldwide.