Bellingcat Challenge #23 "Make the Water Turn Black" Writeup

This article was automatically translated from Japanese by AI.

Challenge

Bellingcat Challenge #23 “Make the Water Turn Black”

This image was captured by Landsat 8, and shows a combination of the shortwave infrared bands.

This combination is useful for differentiating between different kinds of vegetation, and monitoring soil health.

But here, it’s highlighting something else… What is the name of this body of water? (omit the descriptor word i.e. ‘Lake’, ‘Reservoir’, etc)

Solution

The rectangular structures dividing the area around the water are distinctive, so I concluded that this was a salt lake surrounded by salt pans.

Searching for terms such as "salt lakes satellite -great" led to a satellite image of Sambhar Salt Lake. Without excluding great, the results were dominated by Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Comparing the lake’s shape and the surrounding plots with the challenge image suggests that they show the same location.

I checked the location and surrounding terrain in Google Maps and identified the body of water as Sambhar Salt Lake. Since the challenge instructs us to omit descriptor words such as Lake, the answer is Sambhar.

Flag

Sambhar

Notes

As with the previous challenge (#22), I looked through the article linked in the challenge for a similar visualization and investigated its kaolinite clay mining case study. It did not lead to the correct answer, and I spent quite a while pursuing it.