Dust from the White Sands dune field in New Mexico rises thousands of feet from the valley floor and drifts over the snowy peaks of the Sacramento Mountains driven by southwesterly winter winds. White Sands National Monument lies in the 50 kilometer (31 mile) wide
An intense dust storm formed over Western China’s Taklimakan Desert on April 23, 2012. Sitting inside the Tarim Basin, the Taklimakan Desert is the warmest, driest, largest desert in China, and it ranks among the world’s largest shifting-sand deserts. Sand dunes
In late April 2012, dust mingled with clouds over the eastern Russian Federation. The dust likely originated along the border between China and Mongolia and followed a counter-clockwise arc into eastern Russia. Fires along the China-Mongolia border may also have
The irregular southeastern coastline of Kamchatka provokes large, circular eddy currents to spin off from the main southwestward-flowing Kamchatka current. Three such eddies are observed by the International Space Station (ISS) as the winter season blankets
The shallow Yellow Sea, which has a number of busy ports, usually sees 50 foggy days a year; some weather stations in the area have measured fog on up to 80 days. One of those days was March 28, 2012, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on
A few weeks ago, NASA’s Terra satellite flew over East Antarctica and detected swirls of green amidst the ice off the Princess Astrid Coast. For three weeks since, scientists have been trying to figure out what Terra saw in this remote region of the world’s
A strong Harmattan wind carried clouds of dust thousands of kilometers across West Africa and the Northern Atlantic Ocean in early February 2012. Blowing south from the Sahara desert, the dry and dusty seasonal trade wind deposited thick layers of dust on sidewalks and
Dust plumes stretched southward over the Arabian Sea in late February 2012. The thickest plume arises just west of the Iran-Pakistan border. Thinner plumes blow southward along the entire coast of Pakistan.Sandy deserts cover much of southern Pakistan and Iran, and
Off the northeastern edge of Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf lies Mackenzie Bay, which was painted with a ghostly blue-green mass in early February 2012. Icebergs sometimes interrupt flow of similarly colored tendrils northward across the ocean. Multiple factors
Tinakula is a conical stratovolcano which forms an island north of Nendo in Temotu Province, the Solomon Islands in South Pacific. It lies at the north end of the Santa Cruz Islands. It is about 3.5 km wide and rises 851 m above sea level, but rises
