Sites where the ground got barer

What this page is307 rows held · newest sealed read 2026-08-24

• 46 times, at 26 of the 57 sites we watch, the share of our picture reading as bare ground rose by five points or more between one sealed set and the next.
• Those 26 sites carry 307 dated pictures between them, sealed from 9 Jun 2026 to 24 Aug 2026.
• The biggest single move was at Stargate Port Washington: 73.7 points more bare between two of our sealed sets.
• Across the whole feed we can compare 416 pairs of pictures, and 100 of those pairs move by five points or more in one direction or the other.
• Between our last two sealed sets, 17 Aug 2026 and 24 Aug 2026, bare ground moved five points or more at 5 of the 26 sites on this page: Meta Hyperion Richland, Google Pryor, Stargate Port Washington, Meta Rosemount, and 1 more.

Real rows out of our sealed copies

These are rows we read out of dated pictures we keep ourselves. The pictures themselves stay public: every row names its scene, so you can go and pull the same picture we read. What is not out there is this — the same fixed list, read the same way every week, with the weeks the sky took off us named rather than skipped.

What this page cannot tell you

• This is pictures, not permits. Nothing on this page is a filing, an approval, an announcement or a contract. It is what a satellite picture of the same square of ground showed on two different days. We publish no megawatt figure and no percent-built figure anywhere in this feed, because neither of those things is in a picture, and putting one next to a satellite reading would be inventing it.
• Every picture covers the same fixed square, 65,536 pixels of it, centred on the site. That square takes in whatever else sits around the site — fields, roads, a car park, a neighbour's land. A move on this page is a move across the whole square. It is not a measurement inside a boundary, because we do not have the boundary.
• Bare ground can fall because grass and crops grew back over the summer, and it can rise because a field beside the site was harvested or ploughed. We do not separate weather and farming from work on the site, and we will not pretend to. On a site surrounded by farmland, read a summer fall in bare ground as the season before you read it as anything else.
• A cloudy picture is never compared. We only put two pictures side by side when at least half of each one is readable and no more than two fifths of it is cloud. 537 of the 671 pictures we hold clear that bar. The rest are kept and named on the page about pictures we could not use, not quietly dropped.
• Five percentage points is our line and we chose it, so here is the arithmetic behind it. We can compare 416 pairs of pictures. 316 of them move by less than five points and 100 move by five or more. Below five points a reading is inside the week-to-week wobble of this measure, so we do not call it a change.
• The day we sealed a picture is not the day the picture was taken. A satellite passes when it passes and the sky has to be clear, so a set sealed on one Monday can carry a picture taken up to 14 days earlier. Both dates are on every row above, and we never present the sealed date as the date the ground looked like that. In 5 of the 100 moves we publish, the later set's picture was in fact taken no later than the earlier set's, because a set carries the newest CLEAR picture rather than the newest one. Read the picture dates, not the sealed dates, when you check a move.
• We read this list about once a week and the newest set we hold was sealed on 24 Aug 2026. We do not promise you next week's pictures on this page. If a week goes by without a sealed set, this page starts saying so in its own words at the top, and it will keep saying so until we read the list again.
• Bare ground going up is not the same as building going up. Fresh concrete and cleared soil look much alike from this height, and so does a ploughed field. This page says the ground got barer. It does not say who did it or why.

More from this feed

• Up one level: Datacenter ground changesThe whole feed, its price, and how the file arrives.
• What is and is not in this feedEvery source we read for it, how often, and the ones we refuse to collect.