With approximately 80,000 inhabitants, La Rochelle, France, is a city and seaport on the Atlantic Ocean's Bay of Biscay, connected to the Île de Ré by a 2.9-kilometer bridge that's visible in the center of this image captured by the European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel-2A satellite.
A NASA satellite captured a stunning image of winter's effects on the Sea of Okhotsk, which is part of the western Pacific Ocean surrounded by mostly Russian territory as well as the Japanese island of Hokkaido.
The European Space Agency (ESA) Proba-V minisatellite recorded the drying up of Lake Poopó, the second-largest lake in Bolivia.
An especially bright and powerful aurora over the Pacific Northwest was captured by astronauts aboard the International Space Station on Jan. 20, 2016.
The European Space Agency (ESA) Proba-V minisatellite collected imagery in early 2016 of an enormous smoke plume from a bushfire south of Perth in Western Australia.
An international scientific team recently published a new map of the ocean floor based on Earth's gravity field to help submariners and ship captains with navigation, particularly in previously uncharted areas.
The Mississippi River Valley has been experiencing record floods after a series of storms brought heavy rains to the region in late December 2015. The torrential rainfall pushed some parts of the Mississippi River and its tributaries to record-high levels, particularly for the time of year.
Near the 47th anniversary of the iconic Earthrise image captured by Apollo 8 astronauts while they orbited the Moon on Dec. 24, 1968, the modern Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) broadcast new images that show a similar scene, with the Moon in the foreground and the distant Earth in the background.
On Nov. 5, 2015, an iron-ore tailings dam in Bento Rodrigues, a subdistrict of Mariana, Brazil, suffered a catastrophic failure, causing flooding and at least 13 deaths.
Bordered by the North Sea to the north and west, Germany to the east, and Belgium to the south, The Netherlands has a population of 17 million. With more than 400 people per square kilometer, it's one of the most-densely populated countries in the world.
