What was that brain-like pattern featured in our July puzzler and how did it form? The key insight—which none of the hundreds of readers who commented mentioned—was that the pattern was caused by a network of stream valleys and bands of vegetation that follow the contour of the hills. (Read our July 26 Image of […]
Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The July 2015 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, what the image shows, and why the scene is interesting. How to answer. Your answer can be a […]
This is a cross-post from Laura Rocchio and our colleagues at NASA’s Landsat Science Team. The European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2A successfully launched into orbit on June 22, 2015, from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, aboard a Vega rocket (10:52 p.m. local time; 01:52 GMT). The Sentinel-2A satellite has spectral bands similar to Landsat 8’s (excluding […]
Our July 16 Image of the Day—Changing Forest Cover Since the Soviet Era—features a Landsat-derived map showing how forests have changed in Eastern Europe since 1985. After exploring the three areas we highlighted, I highly recommend browsing the map at full resolution using either Google Earth or GigaPan. The amount of detail you will find […]
Many readers were convinced that our June Puzzler (image above) showed Nazca lines in southern Peru. There certainly were lines in the image, but they were located about 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles) away from Peru on a plateau in southern Libya. While the Nazca lines were probably created for religious purposes, the grid lines in […]
