Start Date: End Date: Published Date Data Date
Dust Storm, Aral Sea, Kazakhstan
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Published November 5, 2007
stronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) took this image of a major dust storm (image center and right) along the east side of the Aral Sea while passing over central Asia in the spring of 2007. The white, irregular lines along the bottom of the image are salt and clay deposits on the present coastline. The day that the ISS crew shot the image, winds were blowing from the west (lower left).
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Saskatchewan River Delta, Manitoba, Canada
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Published October 29, 2007
This astronaut photograph highlights a portion of the Saskatchewan River delta extending into Cedar Lake in the province of Manitoba, Canada. The Saskatchewan River watershed extends from the Rocky Mountains of Alberta through the plains of Saskatchewan and Manitoba to the east. Flooding of the Cedar Lake basin following the construction of the Grand Rapids Dam (to the southeast, not shown) in the 1960s created shallow, muddy lakes and bogs (dark green and blue irregular areas).
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Bingham Canyon Mine, Utah
Published October 22, 2007
The Bingham Canyon Mine is one of the largest open-pit mines in the world, measuring over 4 kilometers wide and 1,200 meters deep. Mining first began in Bingham Canyon in the late nineteenth century, when shafts were sunk to remove gold, silver, and lead deposits that played out by the early 1900s. It would take the advent of open-pit mining in 1899 to turn the Bingham copper deposit into an economically favorable resource.
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Fires, East Falkland Island, South Atlantic
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Published October 15, 2007
The Falkland Islands are an overseas territory of the United Kingdom, referred to by Argentina (which also claims the islands) as the Islas Malvinas. Falkland Sound, which is 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) wide at the narrow point, separates the main islands of East Falkland (image center) and West Falkland (along image left). Together they total about the same area as Connecticut or Northern Ireland. The islands lie almost 500 kilometers (310 miles) from the Argentine coast and less than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from Antarctica. The first flights to these remote islands were only implemented in 1971.
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North and South Platte Rivers, Nebraska
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Published October 8, 2007
Lake McConaughy and a tan-and-green patchwork of thousands of agricultural fields dominate this astronaut photo of western Nebraska and northeastern Colorado. The astronaut who shot this view was looking towards the east-northeast, focusing on the thin, green lines of the floodplains of the North and South Platte rivers. These join to form the Platte River near image upper right.
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Oblique View of Dinosaur National Monument
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Published October 1, 2007
In the northwest corner of Colorado, the west-flowing Yampa River meets the south-flowing Green River, which runs into Utah. Stretches of both river canyons upstream and downstream from the junction make up Dinosaur National Monument. The monument takes its name, of course, from the abundant fossils found in exposed valleys and low ridges of the Morrison Formation, a series of rock layers that were formed late in the Jurassic Period, roughly 145 million years ago.
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Simushir Island, Kuril Archipelago
Published September 17, 2007
Simushir is a deserted, 5-mile-wide volcanic island in the Kuril Islands chain, half way between northern Japan and the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia. Four volcanoes—Milne, Prevo, Urataman, and Zavaritski—have built cones tall enough to rise above the green forest. The remaining remnant of Zavaritski Volcano is a caldera, formed when a volcano collapses into its emptied magma chamber.
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Nardo Ring, Italy
Published September 10, 2007
The Nardò Ring is a striking visual feature from space, and astronauts have photographed it several times. The Ring is a race car test track; it is 12.5 kilometers long and steeply banked to reduce the amount of active steering needed by drivers. Although it is a perfect circle, it appears oval in this photograph. This distortion is because the astronaut’s viewing angle was 35 degrees, looking back along the orbit track to the southwest from the International Space Station’s window.
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Shiveluch Volcano, Russia’s Far East
Published September 3, 2007
Shiveluch is one of the biggest and most active of a line of volcanoes that follow the spine of the Kamchatka Peninsula in easternmost Russia. The volcanoes and peninsula are part of the tectonically active “Ring of Fire,” a zone of active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes that nearly surrounds the Pacific Ocean.
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Ceuta, Northern Africa
Published August 27, 2007
he southern tip of Spain and the northern tip of Africa come close to touching at the Strait of Gibraltar. The small Spanish enclave Ceuta occupies a narrow isthmus of land on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar; the rest of the surrounding territory is Morocco.
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Smoke Plumes over Idaho and Montana
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Published August 20, 2007
On August 13, 2007, while docked to the International Space Station (ISS), the crew members of Shuttle Mission STS-118 and ISS Expedition 15 reported seeing the smoke plumes from wide-spread fires across Idaho and Montana. The crew photographed and downlinked images of isolated plumes and regional views of the smoke from different perspectives.
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