National Aeronautics and
Space Administration
The poetry of earth is ceasing never.
—John Keats
“On the Grasshopper and Cricket”
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Carlowicz, Michael J., author. | Friedl, Lawrence, author. | Ward, Kevin A., 1968- author. | United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, issuing body.
Title: Earth / Michael Carlowicz, Lawrence Friedl, Kevin Ward.
Description: Washington, DC : National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Earth Science, NASA Headquarters, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018048628| ISBN 9781626830479 (hardback) | ISBN 1626830479
(hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Earth (Planet)--Photographs from space. | Earth
(Planet)--Remote-sensing images. | Earth (Planet)
Classification: LCC QB637 .C37 2018 | DDC 910.020222--dc23 | SUDOC NAS 1.2:EA 7/21
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048628
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Contents
vi Foreword
2 Atmosphere
4
Curving Cloud Streets, Brazil and Bolivia
6
A Trio of Plumes, South Atlantic Ocean
8
Filling the Valleys, Peru
10
A Glorious View, Pacific Ocean
12
Punching Holes in the Sky, United States
14
Bering Streets, Arctic Ocean
16
Riding the Waves, Mauritania
18
Cloud Shadow, Germany
20
Double Trouble, Pacific Ocean
24
Making Tracks, Pacific Ocean
26
Tracing the Coast, China
28
Four Mountains Stand Out, Pacific Ocean
32
Framing an Iceberg, South Atlantic Ocean
sTn
34
Valley Fog, Canada
eT
36
Holuhraun Lava Field, Iceland
n
38
Lofted Over Land, Madagascar
Co
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40 Water
118
Taranaki and Egmont, New Zealand
42
Channel Country, Australia
120
Cultivating a Border, China and Kazakhstan
44
Tea-Colored Rupert Bay, Canada
122
Barrier Islands, Brazil
48
Coral Cocos, Indian Ocean
124
Tsauchab River Bed, Namibia
50
Bay of Whales, Russia
126
Ice and Snow
52
Storms Stir Up Sediment, Bermuda
128
Mertz Loses Part of Its Tongue, Antarctica
54
The Meeting of the Waters, Brazil
130
Swimming with Ice Cubes, United States
56
A Lava Lamp Look at the Atlantic, Atlantic Ocean
132
Franz Josef Land, Arctic Ocean
58
Teeming Life in the Strait of Georgia, Canada
134
No Green in This Land, Greenland
60
Ephemeral Lake Frome, Australia
136
Mackenzie Meets Beaufort, Canada
62
Dueling Blooms, Barents Sea
138
Sea Ice at Shikotan, Japan and Russia
64
A Bay Sculpted by Ice, Canada
140
North Patagonian Icefield, South America
66
Tidal Flats and Channels, Bahamas
144
Manning Island and Foxe Basin, Canada
68
The Blooming Baltic, Baltic Sea
146
Ice Water, United States
70
Waves Beneath the Waves, Trinidad
148
Omulyakhskaya and Khromskaya, Russia
72
Land of Lakes, Canada
150
Phytoplankton on Ice, Antarctica
74
Plankton and Sulfur, Namibia
152
Heart-Shaped Uummannaq, Greenland
76
Åland Islands, Scandinavia
154
Puma Yumco, China
78
Crater Lakes with Clear Water, Canada
156
Grounded in the Caspian, Kazakhstan
80
Mergui Archipelago, Southeast Asia
158
Ice-Covered Delta, Canada
82
Scarlet Lake Natron, Tanzania
160 Appendix
84
Swirling Bloom off Patagonia, Argentina
164 Acknowledgments
86 Land
88
A Curious Ensemble of Wonderful Features, United States
166 Credits
92
Megadunes and Desert Lakes, Mongolia
168
About the Authors
94
Colorful Faults of Xinjiang, China
96
Bowknot Bend, United States
98
From Rainforest to Rain Shadow, United States
100
A Blaze of Color, Sweden
102
Folds and Curves of the Kavir, Iran
104
Fanning Out in Farmland, Kazakhstan
108
The Zones of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania
110
Liwa Oasis, United Arab Emirates
112
Don Juan Pond, Antarctica
114
Linear Dunes, Caprivi Strip, Namibia
116
Harratt Lunayyir Lava Field, Saudi Arabia
Foreword
of all celestial bodies within reach or view, as far as we can
see, out to the edge, the most wonderful and marvelous and
mysterious is turning out to be our own planet earth. There is
nothing to match it anywhere, not yet anyway.
—Lewis Thomas
Sixty years ago, with the launch of Explorer 1, NASA made
its first observations of Earth from space. Fifty years ago,
astronauts left Earth orbit for the first time and looked back
at our “blue marble.” All of these years later, as we send
spacecraft and point our telescopes past the outer edges of
the solar system, as we study our planetary neighbors and
our Sun in exquisite detail, there remains much to see and
explore at home.
dRo
We are still just getting to know Earth through the tools of
we
science. For centuries, painters, poets, philosophers, and
Ro
photographers have sought to teach us something about our
F
home through their art.
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This book stands at an intersection of science and art. From NASA has a unique vantage point for observing the beauty and
its origins, NASA has studied our planet in novel ways, using
wonder of Earth and for making sense of it. Looking back from
ingenious tools to study physical processes at work—from
space, astronaut Edgar Mitchell once cal ed Earth “a sparkling
beneath the crust
to the edge of the atmosphere. We look at it
blue and white jewel,” and it does dazzle the eye. The planet’s
in macrocosm and microcosm, from the flow of one mountain
palette of colors and textures and shapes—far more than just
stream to the flow of jet streams. Most of al , we look at Earth blues and whites—are spread across the pages of this book.
as a system, examining the cycles and processes—the water
We chose these images because they inspire. They tell a story
cycle, the carbon cycle, ocean circulation, the movement of
of a 4.5-bil ion-year-old planet where there is always something heat—that interact and influence each other in a complex,
new to see. They tell a story of land, wind, water, ice, and air dynamic dance across seasons and decades.
as they can only be viewed from above. They show us that no
We measure particles, gases, energy, and fluids moving in, on,
matter what the human mind can imagine, no matter what the
and around Earth. And like artists, we study the light—how it
artist can conceive, there are few things more fantastic and
bounces, reflects, refracts, and gets absorbed and changed.
inspiring than the world as it already is. The truth of our planet Understanding the light and the pictures it composes is no
is just as compel ing as any fiction.
small feat, given the rivers of air and gas moving between our
We hope you enjoy this satel ite view of Earth.
satel ite eyes and the planet below.
It is your planet. It is NASA’s mission.
For all of the dynamism and detail we can observe from orbit,
Michael Carlowicz
sometimes it is worth stepping back and simply admiring Earth.
It is a beautiful, awe-inspiring place, and it is the only world most of us will ever know.
The astonishing thing about the Earth…
is that it is alive.... Aloft, floating free
beneath the moist, gleaming membrane
of bright blue sky, is the rising Earth, the
only exuberant thing in this part of the
cosmos…. It has the organized,
self-contained look of a live creature,
full of information, marvelously skilled
in handling the Sun.
—Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cel
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Curving Cloud Streets
Brazil and Bolivia
To the human eye, the wind is invisible. It can only be visualized by proxy, by its expressions in other phenomena like blowing leaves, airborne dust, white-capped waters—or the patterns of clouds.
Acquired in June 2014 by the Aqua satel ite, this image shows a broad swath of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Bolivia as it appeared in the early afternoon. As sunlight warms the forest in the morning, water vapor rises on columns of heated air. When that humid air runs into a cooler, more stable air mass above, it condenses into fluffy cumulus clouds.
Cumulus cloud streets often trace the direction, and sometimes the intensity, of winds—lining up paral el to the direction of the wind.
Usual y this means a straight line, but clouds can also line up along the concentric, curved lines of high-pressure weather systems, as they did here.
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A Trio of Plumes
South Atlantic Ocean
The uninhabited South Sandwich Islands include several active stratovolcanoes. Due to their remote location, these volcanoes are some of the least studied in the world, though satel ites often catch them erupting.
The combination of clouds and ice at these latitudes can make it difficult to see plumes of volcanic ash in natural-color imagery.
But using portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that are typical y invisible to the naked eye (such as infrared) enables satel ites to distinguish ice from ash and clouds. The Aqua satel ite captured this false-color image in September 2016. Note the three bright white plumes running down the middle third of the page; they are warmer and brighter in infrared than the cooler ice clouds (teal) around them.
Researchers have learned that even small eruptions like this can affect cloud cover and weather. The tiny solid and liquid particles in the plume (aerosols) act as seeds for the formation of cloud droplets.
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Filling the Valleys
Peru
The val eys along Peru’s southern coast are among the deepest on Earth. They are also frequently fil ed with clouds. In July 2015, Landsat 8 captured this view of the cloud-fil ed canyons through which the Yauca and Acarí rivers empty into the Pacific Ocean.
You can’t see it, but the Pacific lies below the clouds on the lower left. The clouds are marine stratocumulus—a type of low-level cloud so close to the surface that it is essential y fog. Such clouds are a persistent feature off the coast of Peru and Chile, developing most often during the winter and early spring. On some occasions, prevailing winds can push the clouds inland.
Because the marine clouds are low, they are easily blocked by coastal mountains and hil s, such as the Andes. But in areas where low val eys open to the ocean, the clouds move inland.
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A Glorious View
Pacific Ocean
A layer of stratocumulus clouds over the Pacific Ocean serves as the backdrop for this rainbow-like phenomenon known as a glory.
Glories form when water droplets within clouds scatter sunlight back toward a source of il umination (in this case, the Sun).
Although glories may look similar to rainbows, the way light is scattered to produce them is different. Rainbows are formed by refraction and reflection; glories are formed by backward diffraction. From the ground or from an airplane, glories appear as circular rings of color. In this image, however, the glory is stretched vertical y because of how the imager scans the surface in swaths.
Note, too, the swirling von Kármán vortices visible to the right of the glory. The alternating rows of vortices form as air masses run into an obstacle—the island of Guadalupe—and form a wake behind it.
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Punching Holes in the Sky
United States
In December 2009, the Landsat 5 satel ite observed this extraordinary example of “hole-punch clouds” over West Virginia.
This strange phenomenon results from a combination of cold temperatures, air traffic, and atmospheric instability.
If you were to look from below, it would appear as if part of the cloud were fal ing out of the sky. As it turns out, that is actual y what is happening. The clouds are initial y composed of liquid drops at a super-cooled temperature below 0° Celsius. As an airplane passes through a cloud, particles in the exhaust can create a disturbance that triggers freezing. Ice particles then quickly grow at the expense of water droplets. Eventual y, the ice crystals in these patches of clouds grow large enough that they literal y fall out of the sky, earning hole-punch clouds their alternate name: “fal streak holes.”
In this false-color image, pink and faint blue areas are typical water-rich clouds, and bright cyan areas are ice clouds.
The hole-punch areas appear dark around the ice clouds.
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Bering Streets
Arctic Ocean
Winds from the northeast pushed sea ice southward and formed cloud streets—paral el rows of clouds—over the Bering Strait in January 2010. The easternmost reaches of Russia, blanketed in snow and ice, appear in the upper left. To
the east, sea ice spans the Bering Strait. Along the southern edge of the ice, wavy tendrils of newly formed, thin sea ice predominate.
The cloud streets run in the direction of the northerly wind that helps form them. When wind blows out from a cold surface like sea ice over the warmer, moister air near the open ocean, cylinders of spinning air may develop. Clouds form along the upward cycle in the cylinders, where air is rising, and skies remain clear along the downward cycle, where air is fal ing. The cloud streets run toward the southwest in this image from the Terra satel ite.
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Riding the Waves
Mauritania
You cannot see it directly, but air masses from Africa and the Atlantic Ocean are col iding in this Landsat 8 image from August 2016.
The col ision off the coast of Mauritania produces a wave structure in the atmosphere.
Cal ed an undular bore or solitary wave, this cloud formation was created by the interaction between cool, dry air coming off the continent and running into warm, moist air over the ocean. The winds blowing out from the land push a wave of air ahead like a bow wave moving ahead of a boat.
Parts of these waves are favorable for cloud formation, while other parts are not. The dust blowing out from Africa appears to be riding these waves. Dust has been known to affect cloud growth, but it probably has little to do with the cloud pattern observed here.
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Cloud Shadow
Germany
In November 2012, the Earth Observing-1 satel ite acquired this image of a layer of clouds casting a distinctive shadow on another, lower cloud layer. The upper deck was more than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) above the ground. Both layers were composed of stratus clouds, a low-lying type that tends to be uniform and flat. When the satel ite’s Advanced Land Imager acquired the image, the clouds were over northeastern Germany near Harz National Park.
While local meteorological conditions affect cloud height, the latitude at which clouds form is also important. Almost all clouds exist in the lowest level of the atmosphere, the troposphere. However, the depth of the troposphere varies by latitude—thinner near the poles than the Equator, so clouds can occur at higher levels in the tropics than they do at high- and mid-latitudes.
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Double Trouble
Pacific Ocean