Images

A new rift has been forming on Petermann Glacier, Greenland, throughout 2017. An older crack to the right of the new rift also seems to be extending toward the glacier's center. If this new rift meets up with the older crack, and an iceberg breaks off, it would be Petermann's third massive iceberg calving since 2010.

Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Gulf Coast of Texas as a Category 4 hurricane on the night of August 25, 2017. It then stalled over southeastern Texas as a tropical storm and continued to creep northeast over Louisiana.

Vegetation appears red in this piece, which moves from dark to light in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The vegetation grows along streams, which seem to follow a tortured course through the ridges and valleys before wandering through the desert.

Wetlands have a unique beauty when viewed from above. This natural color drone image shows the intricate interactions of forest and surface water in this high-altitude wetland called a fen in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Wetlands enhance water quality and provide habitats for diverse plant and animal species.

It may seem surprising that wildfires burn in Greenland, a huge island of ice and glaciers. But fires do happen there. Earth-observing satellites detected a fire in a remote area of western Greenland in August 2017.

In northern Brazil, the Belo Monte Dam complex on the Xingu River, a major tributary of the Amazon, has changed the course of the river and surrounding landscape. 

In far northern Canada, pulses of freshwater flow down rivers after inland ice and snow melts. These pulses, known as a freshet, carry huge amounts of sediment. The sediment seen in this image flowed into the Beaufort Sea from the Mackenzie River, the longest northward-flowing river in North America.

Around July 10–12, 2017, in the middle of the long, dark Antarctic winter, a rift in the Larsen C Ice Shelf broke through the last few miles of ice to the Weddell Sea and formed a new iceberg. The NOAA National Ice Center has given the Delaware-sized iceberg the designation A-68.

This Landsat 8 image was captured July 11, 2017, roughly 2 weeks prior to the onset of unprecedented wildfires in western Greenland. The slow-burning fires appear to be fed by peat-rich soils that have been exposed by melting glaciers.

An increasingly large gash has opened up in northern Russia's Siberian tundra. During the past few decades, warmer summers and shorter winters have caused permafrost in this region to thaw, which then allows the warmed soils on slopes to slump and erode.

In this region, called the Valley of the Moon in Jordan, steep-sided granite mountains alternate with sandy valleys. It may be an unfriendly landscape, but it makes nice textures for an art print. An intriguing interruption of those textures is provided by a few center pivot irrigation fields.

On an average day during the fire season, multiple wildfires burn in the western United States. For example, 216 fires were active on July 7, 2017. Firefighters were battling 27 of these fires through ground and air support.

The Landsat archive, the world's longest continuously acquired collection of space-based, moderate-resolution land remote sensing data, has now surpassed 7 million scenes since Landsat 1 first began collecting data in July 1972.

This image of the Las Vegas /Lake Mead / Grand Canyon area was acquired on June 16, 2017, with Indian Space Research Organization’s Resourcesat-2 AWiFS sensor. Images of this region can be useful to help detect changes in vegetation and water availability for growing desert communities.

How many pictures have you taken with your smartphone? Too many to count? However many it is, Landsat 8 probably has you beat. Landsat 8 acquires images at a rate of about 750 per day, and just a little over 4 years after launch in February 2013, the Earth-observing satellite on May 31, 2017, acquired its 1 millionth scene!

The 100 millionth Landsat scene downloaded from the Landsat data archive at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Landsat 8 scene was acquired on May 24, 2017 of WRS-2 Path 73, Row 87.

A wildfire ignited by lightning in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge on April 6, 2017, is persisting into May. Hot, dry weather and extremely dry fuels are making the fire difficult to contain. As of May 22, the blaze, also called the West Mims Fire, had burned 152,478 acres.

Today Mount Pinatubo is relatively quiet, and about 300 meters shorter than it was before the eruption. This Landsat image pair shows the mountain several months after the eruption and more recently in 2017.

Is Louisiana falling into the sea, or is the sea inundating Louisiana? It's actually a bit of both. To the inhabitants of a tiny island on the bayou, an island getting tinier by the day, it hardly matters.

This image of the New Orleans/Lake Pontchartrain area in Louisiana was acquired March 31, 2017, from the Indian Space Research Organization’s Resourcesat-2 LISS-3 sensor. Land loss and hurricane hazards are key landscape issues here. 

This is an image acquired with the Linear Imaging Self-Scanning Sensor III on the Indian Space Research Organization's Resourcesat-2 satellite that is now available in the EROS Archive. It is the New Orleans/Lake Pontchartrain area and was acquired March 31, 2017.