Our Beautiful Earth

I collected these images from the Google-Earth Atlas for a calendar for 2006. They are the most beautiful satellite images of our Earth - and some of the strangest. I soon noticed that the Earth's surface is covered with "intelligent designs" which would have important spiritual meaning to many people - would they be able to see them. Only two dozen astronauts have ever been high enough to have seen the Earth from above 20 km - and they had other things to do than look for mystical images. So, the Google Atlas offers the first opportunity to undertake such a search for beauty and meaning. There are many more images to be discovered at.

http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html

Note added in October 2006

During their recent upgrade Google changed the providers of their satellite images. In the process the colors of the Earth's surface, admittedly often faux (artificial), have been changed. The images collected here are no longer available in the Google Atlas.

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North America

Mono Lake, California, a well known place to all of us and large enough to be clearly visible from nearly 40 km altitude. US Route 395 is barely visible, but without the help of a good map, Lee Vining is not.

For this location I can show you a panoramic photo at ground level as a kind of reality check. It was taken from North Crater, the red marker on the Google image, and stitched together from 4 slides. In this example the satellite photo showes a fairly good representation of the ground - although the large size of the landscape cannot be estimated easily from the satellite image.

This and the following satellite image demonstrate, that our ability to construct the earth surface from them is a difficult task. The white alkalide lake bed on the lower right is part of the Death Valley depression and below sea level. Route 395 following green Owens Valley on the left is at an elevation of 1500 m. Some of the mountain ridges in this image are well over 3000 m. Moreover the image makes us believe it was showing three-dimensional terrain. This is partially an illusion: From a satellite altitude of 100 km the earth's surface on this scale is essentially flat.

The image shows the southern end of Death Valley. The white lake bed is -30 m below sea level. The lowest point in the Western Hemisphere. All of this is not intuitively visible. The software on the Google Atlas calculates terrain elevations from satellite data, which are, however, only marginally accurate. Without an additional, regular topographical map the Google images are not very useful as maps - but they are very beautiful and sometimes puzzling: Google's Earth Images are a collection of abstract paintings.

A few hundred miles east of Mono Lake we fly over the Great Salt Lake in Utah - and discover an x-ray image of a desert rat or a salt-shrimp outlined in the vast salt flats. The image is about 10 km (7 miles) long and lies right north of US Route 80 (west is up). This discovery prompted a search for other unusual visual beauties in Google's Atlas.

 Arizona, A Lone Mine-Dog left behind at Whiskey Creek

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Surrounded by salt flats in the Nevada desert appear the ten circles of an alfalfa farm. Each circle is 700 m (half a mile) in diameter and is watered from its center by a sprinkler fed from an artesian well. - But what intrigued me were the many subtle shades of green contrasted by the black-brown volcanic rock formations.

A lake in Nevada, the shroud-like alkali lake next to it gave the image its name.

Baja California

 Many times we drove with the children along the straight road to Laguna Percebo in Baja California without an inkling of the complex estuary the exhausted Colorado River forms when it empties its last water into the Sea of Cortez.

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Like a stone knife lies this island in front of the west-coast of Baja California. 

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Chinese Dragons clawing their way onto a Baja California stretch of beach. 

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The Arctic Circle : Alaska, Canada, and Siberia

Some of the most colorful images are found along the shores of the arctic sea. These large ice floes crowding along the coast of Alaska. The brilliant colors of the image may be a faux coloration of the satellite image and may not represent the natural color of the ground. The reason may be, that the earth is most of the time covered by snow - so that these strong colors are guesses of what is underneath.!

This image, a river meandering through the tundra of Alaska and the following image show the full, colorful spendor of the land noth of the arctic circle. .

 A large area of the northern Canadian Coast .

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 Arctic Canada. A hole in the ice.

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Canada.  Arctic ice agate or lolipops?

 Greenland is on the Left - the little fellow is Iceland. Notice the eye altitude! North is to the left!

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Siberia

The vast, flat tundra of arctic Siberia is pocked by circular alluvial lakes and the "varicose veins" of little streams.

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Another abstract painting of lakes in the Siberian tundra.

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Siberia. Snow-sugared Violets under the Midnight Sun.  

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 Siberia. A Dead Iceberg - or is it Snoopy? - beached in the Tundra

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 Siberian Summer

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 Siberia, Cranberry Mountains

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Siberia, Geometrical Abstract

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Siberia, The Slipper of the Snow Queen in the Ice

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Saharan Africa

Dune formations in the Algerian Sahara. This image is at a much higher resolution than the previeous pictures. One can lower the eye level to below 1 km before the image starts to blurr. The reason for such accuracy are the oil wells here and in the Arabian Desert ( see further down)

Patterns inscribed in the Sahara by an oil field between two mountain ranges.

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 A sandstorm over the Libyan Sahara blurring the silhouettes of the dunes.

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Copper-salts stain the soil of the canyons green in this view of the Algerian Sahara.

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 Libya. An infernal part of the Libyan Sahara. The turquoise color is largely unexplained.

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Libyan Sahara. Intricate green lace contrasted by black soil 

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 A salt-encrusted Lagoon on the Mediterranean coast of Tunisia

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 Centeral Africa Emerald Lake.

 Central Africa Mythical Lady on Horse-back following the King into Exile.

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Arabia

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Hundreds of miles of the Eastern Arabian Peninsula (Emirates) are covered with this kind of pattern of fan-shaped dunes, sometimes resembling fleur-de-lys with water(?) or salt holes in the depressions.

 The same phenomenon is found in the Chinese-Mongolian Gobi Desert

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 In the center of this Arabian desert appears a square, high-resolution satellite image (eye-level: 15 km) - (probably) tinted red. On closer inspection one discovers many oil pumping stations in the depressions connected by roads and pipe lines. The pump areas glow like green computer chips.

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This enlarged  upper left of the above image (at a 2-km eye-level) shows the pipes and roads and some of the pumps

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There are still some romantically beautiful areas left on the Arabic Peninsula, like this silk-screened section of dunes and wadis.

China 

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Northern China near the Mongolian Border. The Castle of the Yellow Emperor. - Coal Fields (?) in the Loess.

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 Northern China. Approaches to the Entrance of Tushita Heaven.

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This strange desert sink is in Mongolia just across the border from the above two images. Even more so than the Entrance to Heaven above this image is a complete tromper l'yeux - remember, the earth is flat from 79 km altitude!

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 Northwestern China:. Looking into the Deepest Hole on Earth. (Turfan Depression : - 300 m)

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Suchow, the Garden Center of the Old Intellectual China

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The sober beauty of fields and rice paddies along the Pacific Coast  south of Shanghai. (Zhejiang)

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 Xinpo, a coastal city in Zhejiang. No intriguing mysticism!

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Pakistan and India

Do you also see an antelope running along this river in Pakistan?

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Not Mount Everest from the North, but alkali deposits in one of the strangest waste areas on the Indian Subcontinent: "The Run of Kutch" on the Pakistani border.

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The Imprint of God's Foot on the Eastern part of the Run of Kutch

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A river meandering through the southern flatlands of Papua-New Guinea - not far from where the young Rockefeller was eaten by the Natives....

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A dying sea monster on the shores of the Kaspian Sea in the Kara Kum Desert of Kasakhstan.

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Laughing Fish in a Kasakhstan salt lake.

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Australia

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A large mussel ear in the Australian desert

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The Balls of Hercules, also there - They are very large!

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Not as large a lake, but Two-Tone

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Strings of turquoise beads strewn into the sand

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The attack of the Spaghetti Monsters

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Mater Dolorosa

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Somewhere in the Australian desert I met this aboriginal Rodent. Look at his hand!

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Argentina

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In Patagonia in Argentina one discovers several areas covered with huge, highly sophisticated geoglyphs. At the latest when one stares at these images, one comes to the conclusion that they are "intelligent designs" created by superhumans - who are actually very similar to us (an essential necessity of any intelligent design!) - who must have studied Renaissance art when they were in college. - Dancers? Birds? - A sacred fish?

Or this one. An Inka pursued by a Giant Rooster and other Birds?

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A Michelangelo fresco among them. Very complicated, a dancer with a banana-leaf skirt and a feather headband - otherwise naked - is sacrificing feet-first a pale-face whose head and dark hair can be made out in the green squares to the upper left....

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Mexico. Two lovers in the rock formations south of Monterey.

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These objects are actually man- or goblin-made: Images of Japanese ghosts at high resolution... You guess!

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Is this a reflection in a lake?

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Dancing clouds - and their shadows - over the lagoons of a Caribbean Island.