Images

An area of degraded land in the Ferlo region of Senegal, photographed in 1994 by U.S. Geological Survey Scientist G. Gray Tappan as part of his work on West African land cover. Tappan photographed the scene again in 2011.

The expanding coal fields in Wyoming's Powder River Basin serve as prime examples of Landsat's ability to monitor land cover change related to industrial growth across the American landscape.

Sentinel-2A image, acquired June 2016, of the Southern Tibetan Plateau

In the summer of 1988, a wildfire ravaged the world's first national park, consuming 1.2 million acres in and around the Greater Yellowstone Park ecosystem.

A massive wildfire on the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia has consumed nearly 600,000 acres of boreal forest and tundra since late May 2016.

A savannah south of Kaffrine in central Senegal, photographed in 2010 by U.S. Geological Survey Scientist G. Gray Tappan as part of his work on West African land cover. Tappan had previously photographed the scene in 1994.

A savannah south of Kaffrine in central Senegal, photographed in 1994 by U.S. Geological Survey Scientist G. Gray Tappan as part of his work on West African land cover. Tappan photographed the scene again in 2013.

USGS scientist Neal Pastick inspects a permafrost plot in North Slope of Alaska near Galbraith Lake.

Heavy rains that began falling during Memorial Day weekend in late May 2016 pushed the Brazos River, 30 miles southwest of Houston, Texas, toward a near-record flooding stage that hasn’t been seen since 1913, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

This image from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2A satellite offers a breathtaking view of Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon. It offers something equally important to park managers, scientists, and anyone else interested in land cover change—a view that is highly similar and complementary to Landsat acquisitions.

The surface level of Lake Mead in Nevada and Arizona has fallen to a historic low as 16 years of ongoing drought in the American Southwest continue to impact the Colorado River Basin.

On May 18, 2016, a Landsat 8 acquisition of flood-ravaged Sri Lanka produced impressive imagery of swollen waterways.

Eleven days after a wildfire first sparked south of Fort McMurray in northern Alberta, Landsat 8’s Operational Land Imager (OLI) captured imagery of one of the most destructive infernos in Canadian history. The fire has burned an area approaching 600,000 acres.

Image of the Week: A massive wildfire burning near Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, fueled by dry conditions and high winds, has destroyed 1,600 structures and forced more than 88,000 people to evacuate the area so far.

When the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded 30 years ago, on April 26, 1986, Landsat 5 was the first civilian satellite to confirm the disaster near Pripyat, Ukraine, in the agricultural heartland of the Soviet Union.  

The main feature here, near Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas, is the Schooner Cays shoal complex. The tidal sand ridges, parabolic bars, and intervening channels explode in a blue rhythm. The Bahamas have the third most extensive coral reef in the world.

The 122nd Boston Marathon, the oldest annual marathon in the world, takes place on April 16, 2018. This Landsat 8 image shows the April landscape of eastern Massachusetts, before vegetation has greened up. The yellow line indicates the point-to-point route that the marathon follows.

Image of the Week, Land Resources carousel

Ice covering Beaufort Sea near the Arctic Ocean typically reaches full-blown breakup by late May each year as air and water temperatures warm, and as daylight turns longer. But 2016 has been dramatically different.

Using shortwave infrared, near infrared, and visible bands, these Landsat images provide a before and after look at the 350 Complex and Anderson Creek fires.

In shallow waters surrounding the Tyuleniy Archipelago in the Caspian Sea, chunks of ice were the artists. The 3-meter-deep water makes the dark green vegetation on the sea bottom visible. The lines scratched in that vegetation were caused by ice chunks, pushed upward and downward by wind and currents, scouring the sea floor.