Top Five 'Earth as Art' Winners

During a span of 40 years, since 1972, the Landsat series of Earth observation satellites has become a vital reference worldwide for understanding scientific issues related to land use and natural resources.

Beyond the scientific information they supply, some Landsat images are simply striking to look at, presenting spectacular views of mountains, valleys, and islands as well as forests, grasslands, and agricultural patterns. By selecting certain features and coloring them from a digital palate, the U.S. Geological Survey has created a series of "Earth as Art" perspectives that demonstrate an artistic resonance in satellite land imagery and provide a special avenue of insight about the geography of each scene.

We asked the public to vote on their favorite images from the more than 120 images in the online "Earth as Art" collection. We received over 14,000 votes and are happy to announce the top five winners:

5th Place: Lake Eyre Landsat 5 Acquired 8/5/2006

The scary face in this image is actually inundated patches of shallow Lake Eyre (pronounced "air") in the desert country of northern South Australia. An ephemeral feature of this flat, parched landscape, Lake Eyre is Australia's largest lake when it's full. However in the last 150 years, it has filled completely only three times. (Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/USGS)

4th Place: Algerian Abstract Landsat 5 Acquired 4/8/1985

What look like pale yellow paint streaks slashing through a mosaic of mottled colors are ridges of wind-blown sand that make up Erg Iguidi, an area of ever-shifting sand dunes extending from Algeria into Mauritania in northwestern Africa. Erg Iguidi is one of several Saharan ergs, or sand seas, where individual dunes often surpass 500 meters (nearly a third of a mile) in both width and height.
(Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/USGS)

3rd Place: Meandering Mississippi Landsat 7 Acquired 5/28/2003

Small, blocky shapes of towns, fields, and pastures surround the graceful swirls and whorls of the Mississippi River, the largest river system in North America. Countless oxbow lakes and cutoffs accompany the meandering river south of Memphis, Tennessee, on the border between Arkansas and Mississippi.
(Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/USGS)

2nd Place: Yukon Delta Landsat 7 Acquired 9/22/2002

Countless lakes, sloughs, and ponds are scattered throughout this scene of the Yukon Delta in southwest Alaska. One of the largest river deltas in the world, and protected as part of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, the river's sinuous waterways seem like blood vessels branching out to enclose an organ.
(Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/USGS)

1st Place: Van Gogh from Space Landsat 7 Acquired 7/13/2005

In the style of Van Gogh's painting "Starry Night," massive congregations of greenish phytoplankton swirl in the dark water around Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. 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.
(Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/USGS)

View the entire Earth as Art collection hosted by the USGS EROS Data Center.
http://eros.usgs.gov/imagegallery/

Ellen Gray
NASA's Earth Science News Team