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Earth as art NASA and U.S. Geological Survey satellites, using photographic and infrared cameras, have taken images around the globe.
Bombetoka Bay
Bombetoka Bay is on the northwestern coast of Madagascar, near the city of Mahajanga, where the Betsiboka River flows into the Mozambique Channel. Numerous islands and sandbars have formed in the estuary due to sediment carried by the Betsiboka River, as well as the push and pull of tides.
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NASA
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Vatnajokull Glacier
Valley glaciers reach into lower lying areas from the Vatnajokull Glacier in Iceland’s Skaftafell National Park. The largest ice cap by volume in Europe, Vatnajokull covers more than 8 percent of the island. Seven volcanoes and an ice cavern system are beneath the Vatnajokull ice cap.
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USGS/NASA
Tikehau Atoll
A narrow ribbon of islets encircles a deep blue lagoon in French Polynesia. Tikehau Atoll is one of 78 coral atolls that make up the Tuamotu Archipelago, the largest chain of atolls in the world. Created over thousands of years by tiny, sea anemone-like coral polyps, atolls are some of the most complex and vibrant structures on the planet.
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USGS/NASA
Taklimakan Desert
A vast alluvial fan unfolds across the desolate landscape between the Kunlun and Altun mountain ranges that form the southern border of the Taklimakan Desert in China’s Xinjiang province. The fan is about 37 miles long and 34 miles wide at its broadest point. The left side is the active part of the fan. Water flowing down from the mountains in the many small streams appears blue in this 2002 image from the Terra satellite.
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NASA/USGS
Rub al Khali
The Rub al Khali, or Empty Quarter, is one of the largest sand deserts in the world, covering 250,000 square miles and encompassing most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula. The desert, which includes much of Saudi Arabia and parts of Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, has daytime temperatures reaching 122 degrees and dunes taller than 1,000 feet.
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NASA/USGS
Nazca Lines
The Nazca Lines are a series of ancient geoglyphs in the Ica Region in southern Peru. Estimated to be created by the Nazca culture between A.D. 400 and A.D. 650, the lines were made by removing reddish iron-oxide pebbles that cover the surface of the desert. When the gravel is removed, the lines contrast with the light color underneath.
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USGS/NASA
Great Bahama Bank
Near Florida and Cuba, the underwater terrain is hilly and the crests of many of these hills compose the islands of the Bahamas. A striking feature of this 2009 Aqua image is the Great Bahama Bank, a massive underwater hill underlying Andros Island in the west, Eleuthera Island in the east, and multiple islands in between. To the north, another bank underlies a set of islands, including Grand Bahama.
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NASA
Kalahari Desert
Derived from a Tswana word meaning “waterless place,” the Kalahari Desert is a large stretch of semiarid, sandy savannah that covers part of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. The Kalahari has vast areas covered by red sand without any permanent surface water, but it is regarded as a semidesert because some portions support more vegetation from erratic rainfall.
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USGS/NASA
Garden City, Kan.
Garden City, Kan., has a semiarid steppe climate with hot, dry summers and cold, dry winters. Center-pivot irrigation systems created the circular patterns near Garden City. The red circles indicate irrigated crops of healthy vegetation, and the light-colored circles denote harvested crops. The 19th-century Santa Fe Trail through central North America that connected Franklin, Mo., with Santa Fe, N.M., passed through Garden City.
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USGS/NASA
Himalaya Mountains
The soaring, snow-capped peaks and ridges of the eastern Himalaya Mountains create an irregular patchwork between major rivers in Tibet and southwestern China. Covered by snow and glaciers, the mountains here rise to altitudes of more than 5,000 meters. Vegetation at lower elevations is colored red. The Himalayas are made up of three parallel mountain ranges that together extend more than 1,800 miles.
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NASA/USGS
von Karman street
Swirling clouds line up in a formation known as a von Karman street. Aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, one of the principal founders of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, described the alternating double row of vortices as “staggered like lampposts along both sides of a street.” These vortices appear when wind-driven clouds encounter an obstacle, in this instance Alexander Selkirk Island in the southern Pacific Ocean.
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USGS/NASA
Belcher Islands
The Belcher Islands are spread across about 3,200 acres in southeastern Hudson Bay, but within that area, only about 740 acres are actual islands and dry land. The mostly brownish hues of the land areas in this image attest to a lack of vegetation, as cold temperatures prevent the growth of robust forests. While they may appear delicate in this image, the Belcher Islands are composed of rock that geologists say ranges from 1.6 billion to 2.3 billion years old.
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USGS/NASA
Edrengiyn Nuruu
Edrengiyn Nuruu is a mountainous region located in southwest Mongolia. The area has an average elevation of more than 1,540 meters above sea level and forms a transitional boundary between the Mongolian steppes to the north and the arid deserts of China to the south. The area’s foothills serve as one of just four known habitats of the wild camel.
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USGS/NASA
Erg Chech
The amber and caramel lattices seen are large, linear sand dunes in the Erg Chech dune sea in the Sahara region of western Algeria. The dunes are formed when large amounts of transported sand are halted by topographic barriers. The largest dunes can take up to a million years to build. Ergs are also found on other celestial bodies, such as Venus, Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan.
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USGS/NASA
Turpan Depression
The Turpan Depression, nestled at the foot of the Bogda Mountains in northwestern China, is a strange mix of salt lakes and sand dunes. At the bottom of the basin is Aydingkol Lake, which appears blue in this Landsat 7 image from 1999. Once a permanent lake and now a salty swamp, the lake is 155 meters below sea level, making it the third-lowest place on Earth’s land surface after the Dead Sea and Africa’s Lake Assal.
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USGS/NASA
Namib Desert
The Namib-Naukluft National Park is an ecological preserve and includes Namibia’s vast Namib Desert. Here, southwest winds have created the tallest sand dunes in the world, with some dunes reaching 300 meters in height. The park hosts a collection of animals that manage to survive in this hyper-arid region, including oryx, hyenas, jackals, and springbok.
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USGS/NASA
Inner Niger Delta
The Niger River and smaller rivers and streams flow northward out of Lake Debo in landlocked Mali in Western Africa. This region is part of the Inner Niger Delta, an intricate combination of lakes, river channels and swamps with occasional areas of higher elevation. Known as the Macina, this wet oasis in the African Sahel is one of the largest wetlands in the world and provides habitat for West African manatees and migrating birds.
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NASA/USGS
Desolation Canyon
Nearly as deep as the Grand Canyon, Desolation Canyon is one of the largest unprotected wilderness areas in the American West. In this Landsat 7 image from 2000, the Green River in Utah flows south across the Tavaputs Plateau, top, before entering the canyon. People of the Fremont culture inhabited the canyon and the plateau from about A.D. 200 to A.D. 1300. The present-day Ute Tribe owns the land along the east side of the river. Fremont and Ute pictographs and petroglyphs are abundant in the canyon.
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USGS/NASA
Ephemeral Carnegie Lake
Ephemeral Carnegie Lake, in Western Australia, fills with water only during periods of significant rainfall. In dry years, it is reduced to a muddy marsh. When full, it can cover an area of about 1,500 acres. In this Landsat 7 image from 1999, flooded areas appear dark blue or black. Vegetation appears in shades of dark and light green, and sands, soils and minerals appear in a variety of colors.
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USGS/NASA
Mount Elgon
Clouds dot the high rim of Mount Elgon’s massive caldera in this Landsat 5 image from 1984. As the oldest and largest solitary volcano in Africa, Mount Elgon straddles the border between Uganda and Kenya and is protected on both sides by national parks. Named Ol Doinyo Ilgoon by the Maasai, this long-extinct volcano has an intact caldera about 6,500 meters across and consists of five major peaks over a distance of 4,100 meters.
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USGS/NASA
Parana River
The Parana River delta is a forested marshland about 20 miles northeast of Buenos Aires and has a vast labyrinth of marsh and trees. The delta is home to a number of rare birds and has become a popular bird-watching destination. It is also home to marsh deer, jaguars, neotropical river otters, coypu and capybara rodents, and the Pampas cat.
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USGS/NASA
Mayn River
The Mayn River is featured in this 2000 Landsat 7 image. The Mayn is a tributary of the Anadyr, flowing roughly northward from its source in the Koryak Mountain Range through the far northeastern corner of Siberia and the forest-tundra subzones of the Chukotka Peninsula. Although these rivers are frozen for about eight to nine months a year, they are home to chum and sockeye salmon during the summer months.
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USGS/NASA
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