On June 16, 2025, NASA's Landsat 8 satellite caught a chain of elongated, oval lagoons near Billings and Cape Billings on Russia's Chukchi Peninsula that lines up so perfectly that — when viewed from above — it resembles a stacked snowman pressed against the shore.
Billings, established in the 1930s as a Soviet port and supply point, sits on a narrow spit of land separating the Arctic Ocean from connected coastal lagoons, exactly the kind of geomorphic "edge zone" where land, water, ice, and wind constantly reshape one another.
