Some images from the Earth Observatory

We recently discovered the NASA Earth Observatory, an on-line platform with the mission to share with the public the images, stories, and discoveries about climate and the environment that emerge from NASA research, including its satellite missions, in-the-field research, and climate models.

It has a big amount of resources, but it’s amazing the free access to all this infinite image’s bank, with a complete description of each picture, geolocated and clasified in different topics as: Atmosphere, Heat, Land, Life, Oceans, Snow and Ice, Human Presence and Remote Sensing. You can also subscribe to receive the “image of the day” report, that we highly recommend as a way to be informed about what’s happening with our planet, but also simply to enjoy the impresive images.

Let’s take a look at some of these great pics:

Above: Athabasca Oil Sands
In the ranking of the world’s proven oil reserves, Canada stands behind only Saudi Arabia. Canada possesses an estimated 178.6 billion barrels of crude oil accessible using current technology. Of this reserve, 174 billion barrels are in Alberta’s oil sand fields, which cover 140,200 square kilometers (54,132 square miles) of the province. The largest oil sand field is Athabasca, shown here.

Above: Upsala Glacier, Argentina
The Southern Patagonian Icefield of Argentina and Chile is the southern remnant of the Patagonia Ice Sheet that covered the southern Andes Mountains during the last ice age. This detailed astronaut photograph illustrates the terminus of one of the icefield’s many spectacular glaciers—Upsala Glacier, located on the eastern side of the icefield. Upsala is the third largest glacier in the icefield, and like most other glaciers in the region, it has experienced significant retreat over the past century.

Above: Sequoia National Park
Naked peaks, sheltered valleys, snowfields, towering trees, and alpine meadows make up the varied landscape of Sequoia National Park in California. The Thematic Mapper sensor on NASA’s Landsat 5 satellite captured this true-color image of Sequoia National Park, outlined in white, on October 22, 2008. Sunlight illuminates southern slopes, leaving northern faces in shadow in this autumn image. In the west, deep green conifers carpet most of the land. These forested mountains are home to the park’s most famous giant sequoia trees.

Above: Thunderstorms on the Brazilian Horizon
A picturesque line of thunderstorms and numerous circular cloud patterns filled the view as the International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 20 crew members looked out at the limb (blue line on the horizon) of the Earth. The region shown in the astronaut photograph (top image) includes an unstable, active atmosphere forming a large area of cumulonimbus clouds in various stages of development. The crew was looking west-southwest from the Amazon Basin, along the Rio Madeira toward Bolivia when the image was taken.

Above: Oil Slick in the Timor Sea
A damaged oil well northwest of Western Australia continued to leak fuel into the Timor Sea in the first week of September 2009. This natural-color image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite shows the area affected by the oil slick on September 3.

Want to see more? Just jump into the NASA Earth Observatory web-site and enjoy!

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