Earth As Art 4

In southern Malawi, the erosion-resistant rock of Mulanje Massif, a large mountain mass, rises dramatically above the landscape near Lake Chilwa, a shallow, saline lake. The upper slopes of the massif are protected forest. The deep green color south of the massif is tea and macadamia farms.

• Collection: Earth as Art 4
• Source: Landsat 8
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What looks like lightning arcing through an ominous cloud is actually a dry landscape of rocky buttes in southern Utah and northeastern Arizona. River channels flow north from Arizona into the San Juan River. The light vertical feature at the top of the image is referred to as Comb Ridge, a jagged fold in the Earth's crust called a monocline.

• Collection: Earth

The Beni River in Bolivia resembles a blue ribbon as it meanders toward the Amazon River. Scattered along the river are numerous oxbow lakes, which are curved bodies of water that form when a meander from the main stem of a river is cut off, creating a freestanding body of water. Dark green colors in the image indicate forest and lighter green shades indicate grassland or

These green and blue swirls in the Bering Sea reveal the bottom of the food chain in the ocean. Microscopic organisms called phytoplankton, which are important to fish populations, may be too small to be seen individually, but in vast numbers they are visible from space. The white clouds in the image look like bubbles in an aquarium.

• Collection: Earth as Art 4

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.

• Collection: Earth as Art 4
• Source: Landsat 8
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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.

• Collection: Earth as Art 4

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. Infrared

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.

• Collection: Earth as Art 4
• Source: Landsat 8
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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).

• Collection: Earth as Art 4
• Source: Landsat 8
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