Have there been any big surprises in geography when satellites started appearing?

by KennethGloeckler
brezzz

I assume you mean from imagery, there have been cases of small geologic formations being mapped for the first time, like rivers and islands as the result of seeing them on satellite imagery. One of the more notable is Landsat Island but there are likely hundreds of finds. And it's not trivial because these tiny islands have the ability to extend territorial waters.

yellocello

Mega-scale lineations were only discovered in the advent of satellite imagery. They're basically large (up to around 100 km long, few km across) grooves in the land surface from ice streaming within ice sheets. They are so long but subtle within existing terrain they weren't apparent without large scale images of terrain (eg 182km2 landsat images) . Their discovery led to some new theories within glacial geomorphology, quaternary geomorphology etc.