The ruin brought about by Syria's civil war is difficult to fathom—not only because the death toll is so numbingly high, but because the numbers themselves are so fuzzy. This week, for example, we learned that more than 200,000 people have now died in the three-and-a-half-year conflict—except that the figure, as The Washington Post noted, comes from an opaque organization based in Coventry, England that won't share the data or methodology it uses to arrive at its tally. All sides in the war quibble over the number, but there are few alternatives. At one point earlier this year, even the United Nations stopped counting the dead.

This fall, researchers at Wuhan University in China took an unconventional approach to capturing the devastation: In a study for the International Journal of Remote Sensing, Xi Li and Deren Li bypassed the death toll altogether, instead turning to U.S. satellites hovering more than 500 miles above the earth's surface. The view of Syria from space, they argued, provides "one of the few sources of objective information" on the crisis. Assessing composite satellite images, they concluded that nighttime light declined by around 74 percent across Syria between March 2011 and February 2014. The exceptions were Damascus, the capital, and Quneitra, near the Israeli border, where the levels of light at night decreased by roughly 35 percent. Syria, in other words, is shining just a quarter as bright as it was before the war.