Dust plumes blew off the northern coast of Africa and over the Mediterranean Sea in mid-April 2011. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image on April 16, 2011.
West of the Nile Delta, a multitude of plumes blows toward the northeast. Forming parallel lines over the Mediterranean Sea, the plumes span roughly 100 kilometers (60 miles) from east to west. West of this collection of plumes is a larger, thinner plume extending from the Libya-Egypt border northeastward over the ocean. This plume’s indistinct margins suggests that it has been airborne longer and traveled farther than the plumes to the east, and may result from smaller plumes that coalesced.
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NASA image courtesy MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Michon Scott.
