When the Cold War grew chillier around 1950, the U.S. military worried about a communist land invasion of the United States. So pilots were employed – many of them veterans of World War II – to photograph the entire country using aircraft.

This 70-year-old archive of overlapping photos was taken at different angles, providing topographic information for artillery in the event the Soviets rolled onto American soil. Such a “Red Dawn” never happened, but those pilots created an invaluable historical snapshot that predates useful satellite imagery by decades.

The collection was stored away and eventually digitized by the U.S. Geological Survey. Now the University of Montana and its partners have created a new tool, Landscape Explorer, which combines those 1950s photos with modern satellite imagery. It can be found online at https://www.landscapeexplorer.org/.

Visit the site and type in a city, location or your own address, and a slider can be pulled back and forth across the resulting image, allowing people to easily visualize the changes that have taken place during the past seven decades. At present the tool covers the American West, from the Pacific Ocean to North Dakota and down to Texas.

You can read more in an article by Cary Shimek published in the University of Montana web site at: https://www.umt.edu/news/2023/10/101723expl.php