A thin green line of the aurora borealis (northern lights) crosses the top of this night-time photograph taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station. The moon appears as a white disc just above the aurora. Airglow appears as a blue-white cusp along the Earth's limb. Moscow makes a splash of yellow light and is easily recognized by the radial pattern of its highways.
Brazil's national football stadium, the Estado NacÃonal, lies near the heart of the capital city of BrasÃlia. The roof appears as a brilliant white ring in this photograph taken from the International Space Station. The stadium is one of BrasÃlia's largest buildings. Renovation began in 2010, and now it is the second-most-expensive stadium in the world after London's Wembley Stadium.
Although Earth's ozone layer has been depleted during the last four decades by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and similar chemical compounds, the changes are expressed differently at the North and South Poles. While a large ozone hole forms consistently each year over Antarctica, the concentration of Arctic ozone is much more variable. Why such differences?
The Kee Bird was a U.S. Air Force plane that made a crash landing after running into foul weather and other issues during a reconnaissance flight to the North Pole in 1947. The entire crew survived the crash, but then had to wait for more than three days to be found and rescued.
Springtime brings increased sunlight, bursts of nutrients and changing water conditions to the Gulf of Alaska, setting the stage for explosive blooms of aquatic plants and phytoplankton”and then the many crabs, fish and whales that feed on them.
Record-breaking temperatures and powerful Santa Ana winds fueled at least nine fires in southern California and northwestern Mexico between May 14“16, 2014. Cal Fire estimated that by the morning of May 16, more than 19,000 acres (7,700 hectares) had burned, and news reports said that more than 100,000 people were forced to evacuate at various stages of the fires.
An astronaut on the International Space Station recently took this night photograph of two of Belgium's major metropolitan areas.
On April 25, 2014, NASA's Aqua satellite observed dozens of fires burning in North Korea. Drooping wires on aging power lines are a common cause of wildfires in North Korea, according to a report published in The Asia-Pacific Journal. Collectively, the fires were producing enough smoke to send plumes of haze drifting east over the Sea of Japan.
In the fertile lowland plains of Argentina (the Pampas), a guitar-shaped forest grows amidst the farmland and has become a wonder for pilots and passengers flying over the region. It turns out the forest is visible from space, too.
Remote. Cold. Rugged. Those three adjectives capture the essence of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. Another word”perhaps more applicable than anywhere else on Earth”is fiery. Forty of Kamchatka's 113 volcanoes are active, either erupting now or capable of erupting on short notice. The Landsat 8 satellite captured activity at five of them during a single satellite pass on April 14, 2014.
