Cloudy Fishing Over China

This Nightpod image taken from the International Space Station is not an interstellar cloud formation but artificial light over a cloudy China.

Nightpod is a camera stand that helps astronauts take sharper images of night-time Earth by compensating for the motion of the Station as it orbits our planet at 28,800 km/h.

This image was taken as the Space Station was flying northwest over the Chinese coast. The lights from cities or fishing boats are dispersed by clouds to create the Nebula-like effect. An astronaut from Expedition 30/31 took the picture on 21 March 2012 as the orbital outpost flew towards Shanghai, China.

Photo credit: ESA/NASA

Westfjords Peninsula, Iceland

This Envisat image was acquired over the Westfjords peninsula in northwest Iceland.

Located in the North Atlantic Ocean east of Greenland and immediately south of the Arctic Circle, Iceland is the westernmost European nation, and has more land covered by glaciers than the whole of continental Europe. The country sits on the mid-Atlantic Ridge, where two tectonic plates are moving away from each other, causing strong geothermal and volcanic activity.

The grey area that is somewhat shaped like a Christmas tree is land, while the colorful spaces between the 'branches' are long fjords – long, narrow arms of the sea that stretch far inland.

During the ice ages both ice and rivers carved deep valleys in the mountains. As the climate changed, most of the ice melted, and the valleys were gradually filled with salt water from the coast, giving birth to the fjords.

The white dots along one of the fjords close to the center of the image are radar reflections from Westfjords peninsula’s largest town, Ísafjörður. More radar reflections from other towns can also be seen scattered along the coastline.

This image, also featured in the Earth from Space video program, was created by combining three Envisat radar acquisitions from 11 September 2004, 14 April 2007 and 3 May 2008 over the same area.

Image credit: ESA

Mount Etna Eruption

Mount Etna on the Italian island of Sicily is Europe's most active volcano. Its latest series of eruptions has continued for weeks, producing ash clouds that forced the closure of nearby Catania airport; lava flows that stretched from the summit to the south and southeast; and spectacular fire fountains. In this nighttime thermal image acquired December 12, 2013 by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft, the lava flows are white (hot), emanating from the southeast crater. The image covers an area of 19.5 by 19.5 miles (31.5 by 31.5 kilometers), and is located at 37.7 degrees north latitude, 15 degrees east longitude.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Checkerboard Logging on the Idaho-Montana Border

Logging operations have left a striking checkerboard pattern in the landscape along the Idaho-Montana border, sandwiched between Clearwater and Bitterroot National Forests. The 1 x 1 mile squares are harvested at different times, producing a pattern of varied timber density and re-growth stages. The image was acquired July 30, 2012, covers an area of 23 x 20 km, and is located at 46.6 degrees north, 114.5 degrees west.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Flinders Ranges, Australia

This image from Japan’s ALOS satellite shows part of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, about 500 km north of Adelaide.

The area pictured is between Flinders Ranges National Park to the south, Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park to the north and Lake Frome due east (none of which is pictured).

The curving structures that dominate this image are part of a larger geosyncline – a subsiding linear trough in Earth’s crust – that includes the Flinders Ranges. The geosyncline consists of sedimentary rocks in a basin that were folded about 500 million years ago and have been eroded to the current landscape. In this image, the different colors show the different layers of rock.

Some of the oldest fossilised animal life have been found in parts of the Flinders Ranges.

Running up the middle of this image is a long, narrow gorge – typical of the ranges.

Along the right side of the image, the terrain is flat with a long, straight road running north–south. Numerous creeks appear like veins across the entire image.

The Flinders Ranges is one of Australia’s most seismically active regions, with numerous small earthquakes recorded every year.

Japan’s Advanced Land Observation Satellite captured this image on 3 January 2009. ALOS was supported as a Third Party Mission, which means that ESA used its multi-mission ground systems to acquire, process, distribute and archive data from the satellite to its user community.

This image is featured on the Earth from Space video program.

Image credit: JAXA/ESA

Greater London

This image taken from the International Space Station shows the metropolis of London and its surroundings. The area is characterized by the M25 orbital motorway that encircles the city and the Thames river winding its way to the Eastern coast. As no streetlamps or other sources of light illuminate the Thames it appears as a black curving line leaving the intense white light of the inner city towards the right. Other areas without light include parks and other bodies of water, notably the large Hyde Park and Regent’s Park to the left of the City Centre and the William Girling and King George’s Reservoirs that supply London with drinking water.

Heading due South from London, down and slightly to the left on this image, is the M23 road to Gatwick international airport and the town of Crawley. The lights of Gatwick Airport shine brighter than the 100,000-inhabitant town. Airports are brightly-lit and easily recognizable from above so pilots can safely direct their aircraft to land. London’s Heathrow airport including the two main runways can be seen at the left of London City Centre.

Continuing south past Crawley to the English Channel, the seaside town of Brighton can be seen merging with Worthing to the left as one continuous stream of light.

ESA’s Nightpod camera aid helps astronauts track objects on Earth from the International Space Station. Following Earth’s motion automatically, the tripod creates clear images in low lights with off-the-shelf professional cameras – 400 km above our planet.

Photo credit: ESA/NASA

Thinning Antarctic Ice

Three years of measurements from CryoSat show that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is estimated to be losing over 150 cubic kilometers of ice each year.

Image credit: CPOM/ESA

The Coldest Place on Earth

With remote-sensing satellites, scientists have found the coldest places on Earth, just off a ridge in the East Antarctic Plateau. The coldest of the cold temperatures dropped to minus 135.8 F (minus 93.2 C) -- several degrees colder than the previous record.

What is the coldest place on Earth? It is a high ridge in Antarctica on the East Antarctic Plateau where temperatures in several hollows can dip below minus 133.6 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 92 degrees Celsius) on a clear winter night.

Scientists made the discovery while analyzing the most detailed global surface temperature maps to date, developed with data from remote sensing satellites including the new Landsat 8, a joint project of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, joined a team of researchers reporting the findings Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Researchers analyzed 32 years' worth of data from several satellite instruments. They found temperatures plummeted to record lows dozens of times in clusters of pockets near a high ridge between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji, two summits on the ice sheet known as the East Antarctic Plateau. The new record of minus 136 F (minus 93.2 C) was set August 10, 2010.

That is several degrees colder than the previous low of minus 128.6 F (minus 89.2 C), set in 1983 at the Russian Vostok Research Station in East Antarctica. The coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth is northeastern Siberia, where temperatures in the towns of Verkhoyansk and Oimekon dropped to a bone-chilling 90 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 67.8 C) in 1892 and 1933, respectively.

"We had a suspicion this Antarctic ridge was likely to be extremely cold, and colder than Vostok because it's higher up the hill," Scambos said. "With the launch of Landsat 8, we finally had a sensor capable of really investigating this area in more detail."

The quest to find out just how cold it can get on Earth -- and why -- started when the researchers were studying large snow dunes, sculpted and polished by the wind, on the East Antarctic Plateau. When the scientists looked closer, they noticed cracks in the snow surface between the dunes, possibly created when wintertime temperatures got so low the top snow layer shrunk. This led scientists to wonder what the temperature range was, and prompted them to hunt for the coldest places using data from two types of satellite sensors.

They turned to the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites and the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on several National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites. These sensitive instruments can pick up thermal radiation emitted from Earth's surface, even in areas lacking much heat.

Using these sensors to scan the East Antarctic Plateau, Scambos detected extremely cold temperatures on a 620-mile stretch of the ridge at high elevations between Argus and Fuji, and even colder temperatures lower elevations in pockets off the ridge. Then, with the higher resolution of the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) aboard Landsat 8, the research team pinpointed the record-setting pockets.

The team compared the sites to topographic maps to explore how it gets so cold. Already cold temperatures fall rapidly when the sky clears. If clear skies persist for a few days, the ground chills as it radiates its remaining heat into space. This creates a layer of super-chilled air above the surface of the snow and ice. This layer of air is denser than the relatively warmer air above it, which causes it to slide down the shallow slope of domes on the Antarctic plateau. As it flows into the pockets, it can be trapped, and the cooling continues.

"By causing the air to be stationary for extended periods, while continuing to radiate more heat away into space, you get the absolute lowest temperatures we're able to find," Scambos said. "We suspected that we would be looking for one magical site that got extremely cold, but what we found was a large strip of Antarctica at high altitude that regularly reached these record low temperatures."

The study is an example of some of the intriguing science possible with Landsat 8 and the TIRS instrument, which was built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Since its launch February 11, Landsat 8 has captured approximately 550 scenes per day of Earth's land surface. USGS processes, archives and distributes the images free of charge over the Internet.

"With Landsat 8, we expect to see more accurate and more detailed maps of the landscape than we've ever been able to see," said James Irons, the mission's project scientist at Goddard. "If change is occurring, I think we'll be able to detect it earlier and track it."

Researchers also are eager to see what new results come out of Landsat 8, both from icy plateaus and Earth's warmer regions.

"What we've got orbiting Earth right now is a very accurate and consistent sensor that can tell us all kinds of things about how the land surface of Earth is changing, how climate change is impacting the surface of Earth, the oceans of Earth, and the icy areas of Earth," Scambos said. "Finding the coldest areas on Earth is just the beginning of the discoveries we're going to be able to make with Landsat 8."

Image credit: Ted Scambos, National Snow and Ice Data Center; text credit: NASA

Spatial Distribution of the Tuolumne River Basin

Spatial distribution of snow water equivalent across the Tuolumne River Basin from April 10 to June 1, 2013 as measured by NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory.

Flying aboard a Twin Otter aircraft, the Airborne Snow Observatory measures two properties most critical to understanding snowmelt runoff and timing: snow depth and snow reflectivity. By combining snow depth with estimated density, snow water equivalent -- the amount of water in the snow -- is derived and used to calculate the amount of water that will run off. Snow reflectivity, or albedo, is the fraction of the incoming amount of sunlight reflected by snow. Subtracting reflected sunlight from incoming sunlight gives the absorbed sunlight, which largely controls the speed of snowmelt and timing of its runoff.

Map credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Note: For more information, see NASA Snow Mapper Reaps Big Benefits for California.

Totten Glacier Ice Shelf

This image shows the Totten Glacier ice shelf in East Antarctica (the wrinkled white area at top left) on September 25, 2013. Two large open-water polynyas appear on the sea ice below and to the right of the shelf, as well as several smaller ones. The open-water areas are bright black. The stippled diagonal line from lower left to upper right is the outer edge of the sea ice, with cloud cover to the right of that line. The image is from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite.

Photo credit: NASA

Note: For more information, see NASA Finds Reducing Salt Is Bad for Glacial Health.

Ivanpah Solar Energy Plant, California

In September 2013 the largest solar plant of its kind in the world started producing power in southern California's Mojave Desert near the Nevada border. The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System uses 170,000 mirrors to focus the sun's heat on giant boilers atop 120m concrete towers, where water is turned into steam to power turbines that generate electricity. The 392 megawatt plant will generate enough electricity to power 140,000 homes. The image was acquired May 30, 2013, covers an area of 14.4 x 15.7 km, and is located at 35.5 degrees north, 115.5 degrees west.

Photo credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Gravity Scar from the March 2011 Japanese Earthquake

Changes in Earth’s gravity field resulting from the earthquake that hit Japan on 11 March 2011 (mE=10-12s-2). A combination of data from ESA’s GOCE mission and the NASA–German Grace satellite, shows the ‘vertical gravity gradient change’. The 'beachball' marks the epicenter.

Image credit: DGFI/TU Delft