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Dr. Amber Jenkins

Amber Jenkins is Editor of NASA's Climate Change website and project manager of the Center for Climate Sciences at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She's passionate about climate change, science and science communication.

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Climate change chronicles from NASA

Pick of the pics
Into the abyss: Dagze Co, Tibet
October 13, 2009
posted by Dr. Amber Jenkins
17:00 PDT
Pick of the pics
Courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan's Earth Remote Sensing Data Analysis Center, the Japan Resources Observation System, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.

Dagze Co is one of many inland lakes in Tibet, with an area of about 260 square kilometers (100 square miles). In glacial (ice age) times, the region was considerably wetter, and lakes were correspondingly much larger. The numerous concentric rings that circle the lake are fossil shorelines, and attest to the presence of a larger, deeper lake in the past. Climate change since then has caused the Tibetan Plateau to become more arid, and its lakes to dry up. The picture was taken by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) aboard NASA’s Terra satellite on October 8, 2001.

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