Michael Cruickshank
@cruickshank
Geospatial analyst, OSINT investigator, and journalist. Investigating the intersection of climate resilience and human systems, and sometimes writing fiction. From 🇦🇺, now in 🇪🇺. 📍Berlin, Germany
The bushfire situation around Bordeaux is looking incredibly grim. The larger fire to the west of the city has expanded into the rural-urban interface around Lège-Cap-Ferret/Arès and has completely cut off the Cap Ferret headland. A second smaller bushfire is also raging to the south of Bordeaux.
"The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world."
Finally got around to adapting this into a full-length psychological horror novel about OSINT, paranoia, synesthesia and hungry ghosts. Just finished Part 1 of 4 entitled 'Desaturation'. If you want to give it a read, let me know, and I'll send you the text. Blurb in the image below:
Looks like these are gas turbine assemblies, and it's the transformer blocks at the front that have been hit. www.falghanim.com/business-spe...
This is a high-resolution image of the buildings targeted. If there's anyone out there who is an expert in desalination plant layout (I'm not), let me know - I'm very interested to know what these buildings are. (2/2)
New Sentinel-2 imagery of the Al-Zour South Power Plant and Water Distillation facility in Kuwait reveals repeated Iranian strikes targeting almost exactly the same area. My guess is these are drone strikes, and they are trying to destroy something very specific. (1/2)
The Al Zour South desalination plant was hit again today. While the thermal signature is larger than the previous strike, it will be impossible to assess damage until the next Sentinel-2 overpass.
While a comparison of Sentinel-2 images taken on the 15th and 17th of July, respectively, appears to show minor burn scarring and possible smoke in the same area as the FIRMS detection. (3/5)
On the 17th of July, FIRMS detected a heat signature in the southwest of the facility. (2/5)
While there is little public information regarding which desalination plants in Kuwait have been hit by Iranian strikes, both FIRMS and Sentinel-2 appear to show the location of a strike at the Al-Zour South Power Plant and Water Distillation, the largest by capacity in the country. (1/5)
RIP Sam Neill - For a celebrity he seemed like a decent bloke, trying to use his platform for good. The below still from Event Horizon is a good example of this (note the flag).
Instead, we should embrace the 'open source' in OSINT and throw our weight behind open source software alternatives such as QGIS and GeoLibre, which are fundamentally more sustainable and less beholden to corporate (or government) power.
The imminent demise of Google Earth Pro, the long-running enshittification of GEE, and Planet's decision to kill SentinelHub are all examples of the fact that the OSINT community cannot rely on tools dependent upon the largesse of corporations that have little interest in our work.
Has anyone ever thought to interest Trump in going swimming at Cheviot Beach in Victoria? Preferably unsupervised. (pic unrelated)
Looks like even worse weather predicted for this evening, with supercell thunderstorms, the potential for tornados, and even the possibility of a QLCS/Derecho.
Intense electrical storm about to hit Berlin. Never seen so much lightning.
This is getting ridiculous. Even as an Australian, I find 43 degrees warm. It would not surprise me if the death toll from this heatwave is in the tens of thousands.
Trying to be helpful, rather than obnoxious here, but this is the (imperfect) solution I use for my pivot roof is windows.
Two computers, same browser, same search query, 4 degree max temperature difference for Sunday. What the hell happened to Google?
The weather forecast appears to have degraded from 'cooked' to 'not very cashmoney'.
Does anyone know if there is a Europe-wide (or EU-wide) page that collates all national-level information on severe weather events/impacts and displays it on a map view? Was thinking of building something like this that also incorporates open source data as well.
Today's Ukrainian drone attack on the Moscow Oil Refinery is causing so much smoke that you can see it using low-resolution geostationary weather satellites.
The irony is that the story already has a deranged LLM as one of the unreliable narrators of an in-novel nested story.
What's interesting to me is that Anthropic has decided that biology, as a field, is more of an X-risk than nuclear/high-energy physics, computer science or robotics.
For some reason Claude has become a nervous wreck reading my novel as it stuggles to reassure itself that I'm not planning self-harm (or nuclear annihilation).