MOSCOW: It was 3:15 a.m. in Belgorod, Russia —too early for a traffic jam, thought Jeffrey Lewis, who was watching the traffic pileup on Google Maps.
Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute in Monterey, California, who specializes in arms control and nonproliferation, was monitoring Google Maps with a research team of students he supervises as part of a project to analyze photographs obtained from space. Colleagues grasped what was going on: a Russian tank unit was approaching Ukraine.
They discovered an invasion was happening earlier news became public, thousands of miles away in California, by integrating Google Maps traffic data with a radar image showing troops.
On Thursday morning, Russia officially announced its attackon Ukraine, which President Biden described as "unprovoked and unjustified."
When searching across the border, the researchers didn't happen onto the traffic congestion by chance.
Indian Embassy in Ukraine said to its citizens and students in Ukraine: It advised that if people heard air sirens, they should use Google Maps to look for local bomb shelters.
Google Maps, as the market leader, moulds people's impressions, including how it draws country and region borders differently depending on where a user is and how it depicts territorial disputes, such as the border between Ukraine and Russia. The Crimean Peninsula is depicted in Russia as having a hard-line boundary, whereas Ukrainians and others view a dotted-line border.
Radar waves pass through the clouds and bounce back, forming a coherent image in which the light beams that depict conventional satellite images only reveal puffy, concealing patches.
Satellite data during the last weeks revealed a considerable number of trucks and personnel moving into Belgorod, Kharkiv, Ukraine, US sources said to be targets of a Russian invasion.
After the initial invasion of Ukraine, traffic data on Google Maps revealed road restrictions near Kharkiv. It displayed halted traffic on road closures leading and information regarding train schedules and stalled service at city subway stations.
Google did not respond to Maps to track activity related to Ukraine's incursion.
Lewis and his crew had seen a radar image from Capella Space, an earth observation firm, in Monterey that looked to show an armed Russian vehicle unit lined up near Belgorod. When the crew looked at traffic statistics on Google Maps, they were surprised to observe a traffic bottleneck so early in the morning.
Also Read: Ukrainian President Zelenskyy Turns Down U.S. Govt's Offer to Evacuate Kyiv
Also Watch: