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This stunning image, taken on July 27, 2000, shows the Lena River in Russia, one of the largest rivers in the world, which is some 2,800 miles (4,400 kilometers) long. The Lena Delta Reserve is the most extensive protected wilderness area in Russia. It is animportant refuge and breeding ground for many species of Siberian wildlife. Original high-resolution image here.
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This stunning image, taken ...
Lena Delta, Russia
These cloud formations were seen over the western Aleutian Islands. Their color variations are probably due to differences in temperature and in the size of water droplets that make up the clouds. This image was acquired by the Landsat 7 satellite on June 16, 2000.
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Aleutian clouds
Aleutian clouds
This beautiful image, taken on 11 January 2001, shows a geological formation in the Maur Adrar Desert in Mauritania, Africa. Known as the "Richat Structure," this snail-shell-like formation was created when a volcanic dome hardened and gradually eroded, exposing onion-like layers of rock.
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Geologic Delight
Geologic delight
A changing landscape in the heart of Madagascar, showing drainage into the sea in the Betsiboka Estuary due to decimation of rainforests and coastal mangroves. 
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The heart of Madagascar
The heart of Madagascar
Byrd Glacier, Antarctica, is a 15-mile- (24-kilometer-) wide, 100-mile- (161-kilometer-) long ice stream that plunges through a deep valley in the Transatlantic Mountains and into the Ross Ice Shelf. It moves towards the sea at a rate of about half a mile (0.8 kilometers) per year. This snapshot of the glacier was taken on January 11, 2000.
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Byrd Glacier is a 15-mile- ...
Byrd Glacier
The Dasht-e Kevir, or Great Salt Desert, is the largest desert in Iran. It is primarily uninhabited wasteland, composed of mud and salt marshes covered with crusts of salt that protect the meager moisture from completely evaporating. This image was taken by the Landsat 7 satellite on October 24, 2000. It is a false-color composite image made using infrared, green and red wavelengths. The image has also been sharpened using the sensor’s panchromatic band.
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Great Salt Desert, Iran
Great Salt Desert, Iran
Ephemeral Lake Carnegie, in Western Australia, fills with water only during periods of significant rainfall. In dry years, it is reduced to a muddy marsh. This image was acquired by the Landsat 7 satellite on May 19, 1999. This is a false-color composite image made using shortwave infrared, infrared and red wavelengths. The image has also been sharpened using the sensor's panchromatic band.
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Lake Carnegie
Lake Carnegie
Some of the most breathtaking views of Earth taken from space are those that capture our planet's limb. When viewed from the side, the Earth looks like a flat circle, and the atmosphere appears like a halo around it. This edge of the atmosphere is known as the limb. Viewed from space, the image of this luminous envelope of gases shielding life on our planet from the dark, cold space beyond rarely fails to fascinate us. What makes this image even more fascinating is the added silhouette of the space shuttle Endeavour. The orange layer seen is the troposphere, where all of the weather and clouds that we typically experience are created and contained. The troposphere gives way to the whitish stratosphere and then mesosphere. This image was captured by an astronaut prior to Endeavour's rendezvous and docking with the International Space Station on February 9, 2010.
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ENDEAVOUR: Some of the most...
Endeavour
These night-shining clouds were spotted over Billund, Denmark on July 15, 2010. These rare clouds are technically called "noctilucent" or "polar mesospheric" clouds, and form at high altitudes, 80 to 85 kilometers (50 to 53 miles) high, where the mesosphere is located. The clouds' high position in the atmosphere allows them to reflect sunlight long after the sun has dropped below the horizon. They only form when the temperature drops below –130 degrees Celsius (-200 degrees Fahrenheit), whereupon the scant amount of water high in the atmosphere freezes into ice clouds. This happens most often in countries at high northern and southern latitudes (above 50 degrees) in the summer, when the mesosphere is coldest. Studies suggest that night-shining clouds are becoming brighter and more common, which is linked to the mesosphere getting colder and more humid. These changes may be happening because of increased levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. In the mesosphere, carbon dioxide radiates heat into space, causing cooling. More methane, on the other hand, puts more water vapor into the atmosphere, because sunlight breaks methane up into water molecules at high altitudes. Research is ongoing.
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Nocturnal Wonders
Nocturnal wonders
This view of Earth from space is a fusion of science and art, drawing on data from multiple satellite missions and the talents of NASA scientists and graphic artists.
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Twin Blue Marbles
Twin Blue Marbles
On the edge of the Kalahari Desert in Namibia, sand dunes are encroaching onto once-fertile lands in the north. Healthy vegetation appears red in this image; in the center, notice the lone red dot. It is the result of a center-pivot irrigation system, evidence that at least one optimistic farmer continues to work the fields despite the approaching sand. This image was acquired by the Landsat 7 satellite on August 14, 2000. This is a false-color composite image made using near infrared, red and green wavelengths. The image has also been sharpened using the sensor's panchromatic band.
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"The Optimist," Kalahari De...
'The Optimist,' Kalahari Desert, Namibia
Captured onboard a NASA Operation IceBridge flight to survey glacier change in a warming world, this photograph shows a beach and stream in Russel Fjord, Alaska, near the terminus of Hubbard Glacier.
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Beached bergs in Alaska
Beached bergs in Alaska
In the style of Van Gogh's painting 'Starry Night,' massive congregations of greenish phytoplankton swirl in the dark water around Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. Phytoplankton are microscopic marine plants that form the first link in nearly all ocean food chains. Population explosions, or blooms, of phytoplankton, like the one shown here, occur when deep currents bring nutrients up to sunlit surface waters, fueling the growth and reproduction of these tiny plants. Image taken by Landsat 7 on July 13, 2005.
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VAN GOGH FROM SPACE: In the...
Van Gogh from space
Small, blocky shapes of towns, fields, and pastures surround the graceful swirls and whorls of the Mississippi River. Countless oxbow lakes and cutoffs accompany the meandering river south of Memphis, Tennessee, on the border between Arkansas and Mississippi, USA. The 'mighty Mississippi' is the largest river system in North America. Image taken by Landsat 7 on May 28, 2003.
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MEANDERING MISSISSIPPI: Sma...
Meandering Mississippi
This iconic image speaks volumes. To many it underscores the vastness of space, the loneliness of the cosmos and how fragile our home planet really is. Entitled “Earthrise,” it was taken by astronaut William Anders during an orbit of the moon as part of the Apollo 8 mission. Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to the moon, which entered the Moon’s orbit on Christmas Eve 1968. That evening, the astronauts onboard held a live broadcast, in which they showed pictures of the Earth and moon as seen from their spacecraft. Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell said, "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth." The astronauts ended the broadcast with the crew taking turns reading from the book of Genesis.
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Earthrise
Image: Earthrise
Nicknamed “Dragon Lake,” this body of water is formed by the Bratskove Reservoir, built along the Angara River in southern Siberia, near the city of Bratsk. This image was acquired in winter, when the lake is frozen. This image was acquired by the Landsat satellite on December 19, 1999. This is a natural color composite image made using blue, green and red wavelengths.
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Dragon Lake, Siberia
Dragon Lake, Siberia
This image, showing tidal flats and channels on Long Island, in the Bahamas, was taken by an Expedition 26 crew member onboard the International Space Station. The islands of the Bahamas in the Caribbean Sea are situated on large platforms made mainly from carbonate sediments ringed by fringing reefs — the islands themselves are only the parts of the platform currently exposed above sea level. The sediments are formed mostly from the skeletal remains of organisms settling to the sea floor; over geologic time, these sediments will consolidate to form carbonate sedimentary rocks such as limestone. Darker blue shows deeper water, while light blue-green shows shallow water on the tidal flat. The continually exposed parts of the island are seen in brown, a result of soil formation and vegetation growth (left).
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This image, showing tidal f...
Long Island, Bahamas
In this image, it’s hard to get a sense of scale or of what we’re actually looking at. This picture, taken by the Landsat-5 satellite on 8 April, 1985, shows sand dunes (yellow streaks) that extend from Algeria into Mauritania in northwest Africa. These wind-blown sand ridges make up Erg Iguidi, one of the Sahara’s ‘sand seas’ in which individual dunes are often more than a third of a mile (500 meters) wide and tall.
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Sea of Sand
Sea of sand
This image, taken on January 21, 2005, shows a collision between two of the largest floating objects in the world, the Drygalski Ice Tongue and iceberg "B15-A" in Antarctica (B15-A is on the right). The 43-mile- (70-kilometer-) long Drygalski Ice Tongue juts out from the icy land of Antarctica into McMurdo Sound like a pier, and is a floating extension of the land-based David Glacier. B15-A, 75 miles (120 kilometers) long, had been drifting slowly towards Drygalski for months before this image was taken. The presence of B15-A complicated supply trips to the nearby McMurdo science base and endangered penguins in the area by blocking their access to open sea. The perspective we get from space allows us to see the scale and scope of changes to these massive bodies of ice that we could not see in any other way.
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Drygalski Ice Tongue, Antar...
Drygalski Ice Tongue, Antarctica
This image, taken on 4 July 2002, shows spiraling eddies known as von Karman vortices over Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Such eddies form as air flows over and around objects in its path. In this case, these eddies were created when prevailing winds sweeping east across the northern Pacific Ocean encountered Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
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Extraordinary Eddies
Extraordinary eddies
Phytoplankton bloom off western Iceland; 24 June, 2010. Taken by NASA's Aqua satellite.
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Phytoplankton bloom off wes...
Phytoplankton bloom
A series of rocky outcroppings are a prominent feature of this Sahara Desert landscape near the Terkezi Oasis in the country of Chad. This image was taken by the Landsat 7 satellite on October 22, 2000. It is a false-color composite image made using near infrared, green, and red wavelengths. The image has also been sharpened using the sensor's panchromatic band.
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Terkezi Oasis
Terkezi Oasis
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. This false-color composite image was made using near-infrared, red and green wavelengths of light. Taken by Landsat 7 on January 24, 2001.
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WALLED OFF: In an area nort...
Walled off
The beauty of Earth's atmosphere and the setting sun. Photo taken by an Expedition-15 crewmember on the International Space Station on June 3, 2007.
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THE SKY'S THE LIMIT: The be...
The sky's the limit
Every summer, phytoplankton spread across the North Atlantic, with blooms spanning hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles. Blooms off Scandinavia seem to be particularly intense in summer 2018.
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A vortex of lighter green p...
Summer blooms in the Baltic

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Interactives, galleries and apps

Images of Change

Images of Change

Explore a stunning gallery of before-and-after images of Earth from land and space that reveal our home planet in a state of flux.
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Climate Time Machine

Climate Time Machine

Travel through Earth's recent climate history and see how increasing carbon dioxide, global temperature and sea ice have changed over time.
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Eyes on the Earth

Eyes on the Earth

Track Earth's vital signs from space and fly along with NASA's Earth-observing satellites in an interactive 3D visualization.
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Global Ice Viewer

Global Ice Viewer

Earth's ice cover is shrinking. See how climate change has affected glaciers, sea ice, and continental ice sheets.
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