Textures of the earth

posted on November 17, 2009 5 comments

Here on earth, we see everything from a standing point perspective. This means that if we look straight in front, we are likely to see the horizon. While this perspective can often be astonishingly beautiful, we are missing out on what satellites see of our giant blue planet.

To satisfy your eyes, here are some beautiful looking textures of our home.

Band-e-Amir National Park, Afghanistan

Wilkins Ice Bridge Collapse

Chaiten Volcano, Chile

Thunderstorms on the Brazilian Horizon

Biokovo Range, Croatia

Carajás Mine, Brazil

Glacial Dust off Alaska

Great Blue Hole, Belize

Some of the most interesting satellites are Earth observing satellites which provide us with incredible imagery for many purposes such as weather and environment. They are usually located at an altitude between 600km and 800km above our planet and travel at an approximate speed of 27 000km/hour. While satellite imagery has been around for decades, it was pretty much inaccessible before 2004. It really started to be accessible and popular when Google launched Google Earth in 2005. Everyone was impressed to see their home on the search engine giant. Today Google Maps/Earth is an essential tool whenever people go out to an unfamiliar place.

Curious minds will also enjoy the NASA Earth Observatory site which offers a daily article with a satellite image related to our planet Earth.

Speaking of satellites, there is also tons of space junk orbiting the earth. This so called debris could be very destructive to existing satellites as a centimeter cube particle hitting an object in space could pulverize that object into even more debris. Fortunately, there is so much cubic space up there that the chance of a debris hitting a functional satellite is quite small.

5 comments

  • Daniel Fuentealba
    November 18, 2009

    great post! as a chilean I was interested on chaiten volcano’s picture. The place is gone. People had been moved from there. Lots of animal left behind. Animal’s lovers pushing authorities in order to come back and rescue them… and they did. I can’t imagine how hard would be to be taken from your place… I hope they will get over it.

  • Maxime Perron Caissy
    November 18, 2009

    That’s sad for the people that were living there… There is no place like home. A home can never be replaced.

  • Armand Dijcks
    November 21, 2009

    Interesting… a couple of years ago I would look on Google maps for areas that had some nice abstract patterns so that they kind of looked like paintings, and then embed that map in a blog post under the title “earth art” (I took it offline at some point). The interesting thing was that the viewer could zoom out step by step and get an idea of where the location was. Seeing your post makes me want to pick that idea back up again.

  • Maxime Perron Caissy
    November 22, 2009

    You should bring this site back up Armand, it’s a great idea.

    I love looking at features of the Earth in Google Maps too! I have created a map in Google Maps of a few places on earth that I would like to visit with a helicopter because of the intriguing pattern! Hopefully one day I can achieve this!

  • Armand Dijcks
    November 22, 2009

    Wow, sounds like that could be a great photography/video project :-)

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