PAG-ASA

Hope, 500 km from shore

Pag-asa - "hope" in Filipino, internationally charted as Thitu Island - is a 37-hectare coral cay in the Kalayaan Island Group, about 500 km west of Puerto Princesa. It is the seat of the municipality of Kalayaan, Palawan, home to a small civilian community of a few hundred alongside a garrison, with the 1,300-m Rancudo Airfield running the island's length. Two nautical miles west lies the Sandy Cay sandbar; 26 km southwest sits Subi Reef, where an artificial island with a 3-km runway has been built on the once-submerged atoll since 2015 - visible here in the imagery.

This scene is different from the others: out here the terrain tiles carry real ocean bathymetry (coarse, ~1–2 km resolution, ETOPO/GEBCO-derived), so the seabed you see - the Thitu reef shelf plunging more than 2,000 m into the West Philippine Sea - is actual data, not a model. Dive below the surface and follow the drop-off. The cays themselves sit below the data's resolution, so they are reconstructed at their true coordinates and draped with ~2 m/px imagery.

Quick start

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