Each of these swirling clouds is a result of a meteorological phenomenon known as a Karman vortex. These vortices appeared over Alexander Selkirk Island in the southern Pacific Ocean. Rising precipitously from the surrounding waters, the island's highest point is nearly a mile (1.6 km) above sea level. As wind-driven clouds encounter this obstacle, they flow around it to form these large, spinning eddies.
Earth as Art
A collection of Landsat 7 scenes created for aesthetic purposes rather than scientific interpretation.
In an area north of the city of Al-Basrah, Iraq, which borders Iran, a former wetland has been drained and walled off. Now littered with minefields and gun emplacements, it is a staging area for military exercises.
Guinea-Bissau is a small country in West Africa. Complex patterns can be seen in the shallow waters along its coastline, where silt carried by the Geba and other rivers washes out into the Atlantic Ocean.
Along Greenland’s western coast, a small field of glaciers surrounds Baffin Bay.
In a small corner of the vast Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia, large sand dunes—the only sand in this desert of scrub and rock—appear as lines stretching from left to right. The light-colored fan shapes are scars from wildfires.
The western region of Australia's Great Sandy Desert is an area almost devoid of sand, but characterized by complex geology.
This scar on an arid landscape is the dry riverbed of the Ghadamis River in the Tinrhert Hamada Mountains near Ghadamis, Libya.
Center pivot irrigation systems created these circular patterns in crop land near Garden City, Kansas. The red circles indicate irrigated crops of healthy vegetation. The light-colored circles represent harvested crops.
The Ganges River forms an extensive delta where it empties into the Bay of Bengal. The delta is largely covered with a swamp forest known as the Sunderbans, which is home to the Royal Bengal Tiger.
Spanning the southern tip of the Florida Peninsula and most of Florida Bay, Everglades National Park is the only subtropical preserve in North America. It is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles exist side by side.