Images

Coral growth offshore of the Hawaiian Island of Kahoʻolawe has been significantly impacted by the island's deforestation and resulting erosion and sediment run-off into the nearshore environment. This image is of a coral reef in deeper waters offshore of Kahoʻolawe.

Varied types of microalgae flourish in this colorful network of shallow, salty lagoons at the neck of the Crimean Peninsula between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. This natural color image portrays the unnaturally strange colors of the area known as Sivash, which is nicknamed the "putrid sea" because the algae in some of the lagoons produce a rotten smell.

The Tietê River snakes across this tessera mosaic of multicolored shapes near Ibitinga, Brazil. Fields of sugarcane, peanuts, and corn vary in their stages of development. Lavender, purple, and bright blue indicate actively growing crops. Light yellow or white indicate little or no vegetation growth. The splotches of dark mustard yellow are urban areas.

It is easy to see from this image why people have been drawn to the Nile River in Egypt for thousands of years. Green farmland marks a distinct boundary between the Nile floodplain and the surrounding harsh desert.

This false-color Landsat 8 image shows valleys and snow-covered mountain ranges in southeastern Tibet. It was captured on August 4, 2014.

Abstract figures seem to appear on these South American plateaus. It is reminiscent of Southwestern artistic style with a modernist abstract twist. These farm fields are on the tops of plateaus in northeastern Brazil. Where the edges of the fields are ragged lines, the fields have been planted right up to the edge of cliffs.

In northern Russia, the freshwater of the Mezen River meets the saltwater of the Arctic Ocean. The funnel-shaped estuary has a strong tidal current that mixes sediment in the water rather than building up a delta. In this colorful composition, the increasing brightness marks an increase in water turbidity

The deep purple in the lower right spreads out into a few channels before fading into a multitude of colors. These channels are remnants of an ancient drainage network in Kenya. The beauty of the colors actually hides a stark reality for hundreds of thousands of people. The dark spots at the top center of the image are refugee camps.

The ice surrounding the northern Canadian Spicer Islands, shown in bright red, resembles a cell, complete with ribosomes, mitochondria, and a nucleus. Even though the image was captured shortly after the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, the islands are locked in ice.

Located on the northwestern coast of Greenland, Petermann Glacier covers 1,295 square kilometers (500 square miles). The glacier's floating tongue of ice extends from the lower right corner of the image toward the top center. At 15–20 kilometers (9–12 miles) wide and 70 kilometers (43 miles) long, it is the longest floating glacier in the Northern Hemisphere.

A bold paint stroke on a busy purple canvas is actually part of the Dasht-e Lut Desert in southeastern Iran. The linear features are kaluts, huge rocky formations shaped by wind erosion. The streamlined forms vary in size, but some kaluts stretch more than 100 kilometers (62 miles).

Like blue ink bleeding onto parchment, the Khor Kalmat lagoon branches off the Arabian Sea and spills into the southern Pakistan landscape near the Makran Coast Range. Mudflats cover almost the entire lagoon, which fills with shallow water at high tides. The small areas of green are isolated pockets of mangrove forest.

A nearly perfect circle of forest delineates the boundary of Egmont National Park in New Zealand. Snow-capped Mount Taranaki marks the center of the park, which is surrounded by green farmland.

The copper color in this infrared combination is the presence of lake ice in the Northwest Territories in northern Canada. The lake on the right side is Whitefish Lake, in a region with numerous glacial landforms. Bright wrinkle-like lines are eskers, ridges made of sand and gravel formed by glacial sediments deposited by meltwater rivers flowing on the ice.

Water flowing out of this inland delta rarely reaches the ocean; instead, it seeps into the semiarid plains of northeastern Kenya. The dark feature in the upper left, which looks like a black eye, is hard basaltic rock from an ancient lava flow.

The Susquehanna River appears as a dark line coursing through this scene in southeastern Pennsylvania. The cities of York, Lancaster, and Reading lie among agricultural lands. The State capital, Harrisburg, is positioned against the orange folds in the upper left of the image, along the edge of the Appalachian Mountain Ridge and Valley Province.

A vast, open expanse in Namibia is one of the largest salt pans in the world. The pan is within Etosha National Park, protected since 1907. The horizontal line across the image is the national park fence. The wild patterns in this infrared interpretation are from numerous episodes of water evaporation following seasonal rains.

These cloud patterns cast eerie shadows on the landscape of southern Egypt. The clouds appear red and the desert below hazy blue in this infrared rendition.

Is this a black-and-white image? No, this is a natural color image of snow-covered southwestern Russia. Windbreaks, roads, and fence lines look like random pencil marks near the Volga River, which flows across the top of the image.

Marking part of the boundary between Colombia and Venezuela, the Meta River resembles an artery among capillaries within the human body. Those capillary-like features actually depict dense tree cover along the numerous streams that flow among rich tropical grassland.

Agriculture expansion between 1975 and 2013 and bioclimatic zones of West Africa (includes rainfed agriculture, irrigated agriculture, plantations, agriculture in shallows and recession, and cropland and fallow with oil palms)