Photos: Earth as art
Southern Sahara Desert, Africa
Credit: NASA
What appear as soft shades of blue and blond are actually one of the harshest landscapes on Earth. This glimpse of Africa’s Sahara Desert, located near where the borders of Mali, Niger, and Algeria converge, is truly a no-man’s-land—a world of sand and rock without roads or settlements. The horizontal lines across the top half of the image are intrusions of igneous rock, where magma has emerged from deep underground. Landsat 5 acquired this image in 2009.
