Ephemeral Lake
Patches of southern Australia's shallow Lake Eyre seem to form a grimacing face in an August 2006 satellite picture. When seasonal rains are plentiful, the water body is Australia's largest lake. But it's also an "ephemeral" feature in a dry land: The lake has only filled three times during the past 150 years.
Sinewy Delta
Like branching blood vessels, the Yukon Delta's sinuous waterways empty into the Bering Sea in a 2002 satellite picture. The Yukon River—which begins in the Canadian province of British Columbia and crosses through the Yukon Territory and Alaska—was protected in 2010 as part of the United States' new Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge.
Van Gogh Algae
In the style of Van Gogh's "Starry Night," massive congregations of greenish phytoplankton swirl in dark water around Sweden's Gotland island. 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.
Meanderring Mississippi
The Mississippi River—North America's largest—unfurls like a teal ribbon through towns, fields, and pastures on the Arkansas-Mississippi border in a 2003 satellite picture.
Giant Sand Sea
White bits of cloud cast black shadows on the Rub' al Khali desert near the border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen in a 2003 satellite picture.
Extreme Salt Dessert
Like poster paints run wild, a 2003 image captures an "eclectic montage" of landscapes in Iran's largest desert, the Dasht-e Kavir, or Great Salt Desert. The mostly uninhabited region—a mix of dry streambeds, desert plateaus, mud flats, and salt marshes—covers an area of more than 29,730 square miles (77,000 square kilometers).
Startling Trench
What looks like red paint is actually a "remarkable interplay of light and cloud" captured in 2004 in the Canadian Rockies. Low clouds filled a part of the Rocky Mountain Trench, which sits near the border between the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. Light reflecting off the clouds, coupled with low sun elevation.
Stunning Ice Shapes
A complex "circuitry" of Greenland fjords among red-tinted mountains ease the flow of glacial ice into the Atlantic Ocean in 2001. When temperatures rise in the summer, newly calved icebergs here join slabs of sea ice and older, weathered icebergs in an offshore slurry that sometimes "swirls into stunning shapes".
Glimmering Crater
Tin Bider, an ancient and eroded meteor crater in the Algerian Sahara, glimmers in a 2009 picture. Nearly 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) wide, the crater was caused by a meteorite impact in this region of northern Africa roughly 70 million years ago.
Greasy Ice Galaxies
Resembling distant galaxies amid clouds of interstellar dust, chunks of sea ice drift through swirls of grease ice near Canada's Baffin Island in 2002. Sea ice often begins as grease ice, a soupy slick of tiny ice crystals on the ocean's surface. As the temperature drops, grease ice thickens and coalesces into solid ice slabs.
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